The End of Consciousnessism
Sometimes things with vague or multiple definitions are not things at all
Let’s take a break from deflating AI and pop a different bubble: consciousness. Belief in consciousness—consciousnessism—will inevitably fade away as Vitalism did.
The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology defines the term consciousness:
Consciousness — The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define, except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness — to be conscious, it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. [1]
There are so many other definitions and models of consciousness that one gains a new appreciation for this first definition.
Consciousness as Wakefulness
Consciousness is what we have when we are not unconscious. We become unconscious when we enter deep, non-dreaming sleep, go under anesthesia, or suffer brain injury. This definition tells us what consciousness is not—not what it is or why it exists.
Consciousness as Sentience
“A person, animal, or other object may have consciousness in the broadest sense if it is sentient—capable of sensing and responding to its world” [2]. This does not tell me how intelligence is different from consciousness. My definition of natural intelligence given in the post What Is Intelligence?, qualifies some single-celled organisms and plants as having consciousness.
Consciousness as What-is-it-like-to-be-something
Thomas Nagel asked what it was like to be a bat. “According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is 'something that it is like' to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view.” [3] Nagel presumes an objective and subjective dichotomy. This dichotomy is an ancient idea derived from Universalism: that objective truth is timeless, immutable, and incontrovertible and subjective experience is not. If you question the idea of objective, disembodied truth, as I do, then you must also question the premise of its opposite: subjective truth. This is a topic for another post.
I address Nagel's question “what-is-it-like-to-be-something” in a forthcoming post, Artificial Arcs and Natural Cycles. I contrast the reflexive arc of computers and neural networks with the perception-action cycle found in all intelligent animals.
Weak or Access Consciousness
A simple definition of consciousness is having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that guide action. If you believe, as I do, that nonhuman animals can have thoughts and feelings, then most animals have access consciousness.
Honey bees exhibit this weak form of consciousness when we train them using appetitive feedback (positive reinforcement) using sugar water. We also train them to avoid paths or actions using adverse feedback (negative reinforcement), such as electric shocks. Research has suggested that emotion influences the behavior of honey bees. As a beekeeper, I know this to be true. In August, when nothing is flowering, the girls are quick to anger.
If you ignore feelings, one could attribute access consciousness to a Tesla self-driving car. I don't think Elon Musk would claim that his cars were conscious, nor that cars should have emotions.
Consciousness as Self-Recognition
Self-recognition is the ability to recognize one’s own body. A mirror test is used to determine which animals can recognize themselves. A scientist sedates an animal and marks its face in a location the animal can't see without a mirror. When the animal regains consciousness, it looks into a mirror. If it tries to remove the mark, it must recognize the reflection as itself. Bonobos, orangutans, chimpanzees, dolphins, orcas, elephants, magpies, and pigeons can recognize themselves in a mirror. In 2019, researchers added fish to the list: the tiny cleaner wrasse [4]. The conclusions of the cleaner wrasse research are not without controversy [5].
My post Who Are I? Discerning Shards of Self, the body-self and mental-self are both external to the neuro-self. So body-awareness or self-recognition becomes unremarkable.
Strong or Phenomenal Consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness is experience [6]. Robots can sense and act—called weak or access consciousness—but do they experience the same as we do? Most agree that robots do not experience life as we humans do. Phenomenal consciousness seeks to explain that difference. Philosopher David Chalmers has called it the hard problem of consciousness [7]. Chalmers and other philosophers want to know if the color red you see is the same color red I see. Since I deny universalism, I do not consider RED to be a disembodied, universal truth [8]. So whether we are perceiving the same universal truth becomes irrelevant. All that matters is that you and I agree that the red you see and the red I see are the same thing.
Speaking of red, did you know that purple is an illusion created in your brain? Red is light of a wavelength of 625 to 740 nanometers. Blue is light of a wavelength from the opposite end of our visible spectrum. Purple is what we see when we mix blue and red. But instead of seeing blue and red, we see a perceptual fiction called purple. Radio, microwaves, light, and X-rays are all electromagnetic waves on a linear spectrum. However, we perceive our narrow band of light, colors, as a looping spectrum—once again, a fiction. So do honey bees. Their narrow band of sensed light extends from orange-yellow to ultraviolet. They do not sense red, but they do sense bee-purple, the mixture of orange-yellow and ultraviolet.
What I find most interesting about phenomenal consciousness is the experience of a voice or movie inside my head—without lips or ears—that whispers to me during the day and streams baffling dreams at night. These are experiences that do not originate from my senses or perceptions. This begs the question: Who is creating these streams of consciousness and who is watching them? Is the creator and the observer the same or different actors? This question gets answered after we develop the EvoInfo model of natural intelligence.
Consciousness as Reification
Sometimes things with vague or multiple definitions are not things at all.
The word consciousness is an adjective made into a noun—it is the nominalization of 'conscious'. Although I can be conscious or aware of something, that does that make consciousness or awareness into physical or measurable thing like magnetic fields or air. Reification or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the error of treating an adjective, abstract idea, or hypothetical concept as if it were a physical entity.
We refer to plants and animals as living things, but ever since the demise of Vitalism, we no longer consider ‘life’ to be a noun for an independent essence that gets added to inanimate matter to make it alive. Vitalism was the theory that life depended on a force or essence distinct from inert or lifeless matter. Today we consider life to represent a set of properties or attributes that apply to plants and animals—it is an adjective posing as a noun. And I suspect that consciousness is also an adjective posing as a noun.
Although life-as-essence is no longer a popular idea, the related concepts of panpsychism and souls are still very much alive. Panpsychism is the belief that every thing contains some amount of consciousness (whatever that is). It is dualism reborn because, once again, the mind comprises a physical part and a non-physical part. In theological circles, a soul is a disembodied spirit that persists even after the body expires. Both ideas are beyond the reach of science.
Consciousness, like life-as-essence, is a reification—an abstract concept posing as a material thing. Life-as-essence, souls, panpsychism, and consciousness—as things—defy scientific inquiry because they cannot be detected or measured using physical instruments. However, once our understanding of natural intelligence matures, the properties and attributes associated with consciousness will make perfect sense within a natural intelligence framework. Any supernatural explanation, at that point, will appear less tenable. I predict that Consciousnessism will suffer the same fate as Vitalism.
I still consider the word 'consciousness' to be as useful as the modern usage of the word 'life'. Knowing that it is an adjective posing as a noun does not make it less interesting. When I use the word consciousness, please remember that I am using it as a term for a set of neurological, behavioral, and psychological properties and phenomena that are currently poorly understood.
What do you think? Am I off my rocker? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
[1] Stuart Sutherland (1989). "Consciousness". Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-38829-7.
[2] Armstrong, D. 1981. “What is consciousness?” In The Nature of Mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
[3] Van Gulick, Robert, "Consciousness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/consciousness/>.
[4] Kohda M, Hotta T, Takeyama T, Awata S, Tanaka H, Asai J-y, et al. (2019) If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals? PLoS Biol 17(2): e3000021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021
[5] de Waal FBM (2019) Fish, mirrors, and a gradualist perspective on self-awareness. PLoS Biol 17(2): e3000112. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000112
[6] Block N. 1995 On a confusion about the role of consciousness. Behav. Brain Sci. 18, 227–287. (doi:10.1017/S0140525X00038188)
[7] Chalmers, David (1995). "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–219.
[8] I am referring here to the concept of RED and not it’s physical attributes such as a wavelength of 625 to 740 nanometers.
Author note: This is a highly abridged excerpt from The Book. The original text includes more journal references and cross-references within the book. Please register so you can be notified as soon as The Book is published.
....and remember, consciousness is a product of the mind, our brains. When the brain dies and there is no longer any electrical activity, no neural transmission, the chemistry is kaput, so is consciousness.
I would go so far as to say not only is consciousness not a property of this universe, consciousness does not exist in this universe. Before you bluster, let me clarify.
This is Super Mario. He is fictional character who only exists inside a video game. He is not real. He is not part of this universe. He is made entirely of information. He “exists”, moves around, does things, follows rules, inside a *virtual* world. This virtual world runs in computer software, and while that computer exists in the physical universe, Mario himself does not. He is not constrained to follow the real rules of physics.Compare Mario to a rock.
The rock exists, can be examined. Can be compared with other rocks. Two people can experience the same rock at the same time. The rock is made of atoms, and those atoms obey the laws of physics. Human consciousness is more like Mario than the rock.
Consciousness is solely experienced by a single individual. Consciousness is little more than our ability to experience events, both real events and imagined. The best description of this system is the notion that we use computation (done biologically) to synthesise a virtual world which closely resembles external reality. It is a simulation. It is not always entirely faithful. It is limited in terms of what our senses can detect and what our brains can infer. But it is how we manage to comprehend our world well enough to take purposeful action.
Our consciousness inhabits this virtual world in much the same way that Super Mario inhabits the virtual worlds of Nintendo games.
No amount of cracking open consoles will ever result in us finding a tiny Italian plumber. And no amount of delving around in the fatty grey matter of brains will result in us finding consciousness as a physical phenomenon.
Glyn Williams (who is conscious some of the time).