Outline
This is a summary of a little chat I had with the Probus folks at Shaughnessy Golf Club. It’s basically an extension of a small blurb I wrote for the BCMJ a few years ago. Yes. I know. It’s hokey to cite yourself! But I am old enough not to care about this type of thing anymore. ROFL.
Just to give a bit of background, I was born in 1956 and grew up in Southern Ontario overtop of a small town funeral home which was my family’s small town business. Btw, in those days in that small town the ambulance business was a sideline of the funeral business which was run out of the same premises. In those days the police would call and say bring the blue ambulance or bring the black hearse. Depending. I went to medical school twenty years later in 1976 at Toronto where I lived overtop of a big funeral home because the rent was free and I was paid ten bucks a night to answer the phone and I was poor. For the vast majority of the last 43 years anesthesia has been my gig. Read what you want into this history regarding this subject matter.
For the next little while we’ll wander through the strange words in this consciousness business, the big names in this business, some neuroanatomy and neuroscience but most importantly the Darwinian biological evolution of consciousness. This topic has become confusing. Well, maybe it always has been? What I hope is that at the end of this talk we can understand it from an evolutionary point of view.
Consciousness, like most other concepts these days is ripped into two sides of an argument. There is the woo-woo, spiritual, non physical cosmic consciousness stuff. I have always wondered how “it” can be “stuff” if it is non-physical. But anyway. AND then there is the basic physical neuroscience stuff.
These days it seems anybody can believe anything they want, and I am not going to change anyone’s mind with facts. Science is evolving somewhat like this now. Just look at the academic bun fights over the various interpretations of quantum mechanics at the base level of physics. There is a generalization of the placebo effect in medicine which is getting more traction these days that is called the expectation effect which basically says that the old concept of seeing is believing is not the way it is. Unh unh! Believing is “seeing”. What you believe determines what you see!
My hope here is that after this little talk you will be able to understand why people get all bent out of shape arguing if their dogs, or their cats, or their pond fish or their pet rocks are conscious. Personally I would go for the mammalian dogs and cats. But the pond fish and pet rocks? Meh.
Words of Consciousness
Let’s start with words. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg’s always complained that words are defined by other words….so it’s all self referential…as the philosophy guys say…so it’s all paradoxical.
The word consciousness was first used (in French) by Rene Descartes to mean either a thought or a thought about a thought. Notice the self referential paradox again. Fast forward four hundred years and a frustrated Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of AI, said consciousness is just a suitcase word and suitcase words are just linguistic placeholders. There are many other cool sounding “descriptions” made up by really smart people in this business. The mathematical physicist Max Tegmark says consciousness is the way information feels when it gets processed. Nice. Eh. Claude Shannon the father of information theory (the reason you can talk on a cell phone) said consciousness is just complexity.
The subjective nature of consciousness makes it difficult even to define. The closest we have to a consensus is that there is “something it is like to be conscious” Science is objective and consciousness is subjective and never the twain shall meet? Supposedly.
Subconsciousness of Consciousness
Subconscious is another word that despite being mostly Freudian anal retentive oedipal nonsense has become common vernacular. Most things in your head are subconscious, which is true. You are not really conscious of your blood pressure but you are conscious of the fact that I am of talking to you. The reason for this should be apparent to you by the end of this chat….at least from an evolutionary point of view.
Remember those gorilla suit experiments? There’s a group passing around a big white ball and you are asked to pay attention and count how many times the ball is passed. And ninety percent of people do not register the guy in a gorilla suit that walks through the people passing the ball. So if you don’t attend to something it it is not there…you are not conscious of it.
Epiphenomenon of Consciousness
Here is a word that is it thrown around a lot in this business. It means something is real but has no function....like the froth on the ocean... It’s an “accident” like blood being red or you look at the sun and having a sneezing reflex….So you will hear a lot of “Oh consciousness is just an epiphenomenon.” In the end it is just another word for we don’t know but you seem a little smarter using the big weird word epiphenomenon.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
This started with a now famous 1970’s essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”. The hard problem of consciousness was turned into a subspecialty by the philosopher David Chalmers over 20 years ago now. There is the easy problem of consciousness. That’s all the sciency stuff…finding the so called neural correlates of consciousness…some little part of your brain is somehow measured when you are experiencing something….that’s the easy problem. Then there’s the hard problem of consciousness….just what does it feel like to be experiencing this something. Some say that we will never answer this question because the thing with consciousness is studying the consciousness. And you can never disprove someone’s self report. It’s a paradox. ………My guess is that the people in this room have been listening to the stuff going on in Ottawa long enough realize that the building block of the universe is paradox.
Personally I think that with more basic science the hard problem of consciousness goes away. Now which century this happens in is another story.
I say this because in the 1950’s science found that four amino acids that could be “read” like a ticker tape was the base code for life and everything else was window dressing. This is the DNA genetic base code. We have no idea of the brain’s base code…it probably has something to do with electric spikes but we only have a crude MRI measure for blood flow for a little cubic centimeter in the brain that contains millions of neurons. We will find the base code someday. Again which century this happens is the real question.
What does it mean for you to be you, as opposed to being a bat? And how does this feeling of being you emerge from the conglomeration of cells we keep in our skulls? Science has shied away from these sorts of experiential questions, because it’s not obvious how science’s tools could explore them.
Hard Problem Sidebar
Btw, this is not a new issue. It was the same in the 17th century when it came to the problem of motion. Prior to Newton, Aristotle had a good mechanical explanation. Here is book on the table. I push it with my hand. It moves. This did not work for the planets. Newton came along and said there are forces that can’t be captured mechanically. He said there was this big invisible elastic called gravity out there which sucked everything together. This was spooky action at a distance. And it bothered Newton tremendously as he was very religious. He was accused by the neo scholastics of the day of practicing occultism. So we ever since Newton according to the most cited scientist ever, Noam Chomsky we just gave up on understanding motion; we just had an understanding of the theory of motion.
Quantum mechanics, which Einstein disliked, and its interpretations are the prime example of paradox …right from physics. So the electron is everywhere in the universe according to the Schrodinger equation but when we look it is right there in one spot. Neils Bohr, the physicist called it complementarity. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher called it incommensurate vocabularies. Harold Pattee, the unknown neuroscience genius called it the Schnitt. On one side of the Schnitt, there is the firing of neurons. On the other side there are the representations of the physical in the brain that also have a physical reality. Only one side of the Schnitt can be evaluated at a time, though both are real. Ah yes, the word real which brings us to two other fancy words.
Ontology and Epistemology of Consciousness
Epistemology is just a fancy word for how knowledge grows. Ontology is just a fancy word for what is real. There are many mainstream neuroscientists who say that we may just have to accept that consciousness is an “ontological primitive”.
Apologies for this. But. If you are going to talk about how consciousness brings experience into being then you can’t avoid philosophy. Like Alfred North Whitehead said we are all footnotes to Plato.
Emergence and Consciousness
A molecule of water it is not wet. If you take a tank of water molecules it is wet. An new property has EMERGED. One hears this all the time now. So a neuron is not conscious but a brain is. This again is using a fancy word for we don’t know. Or, to use another analogy, you could say “and then a miracle happens!” The trouble is that this sorta betrays science.
One certainly hears about it in the biology world with arguments about what is alive and what is not alive. Or what is conscious and what is not conscious. Darwin even chimed in on this in the mid 1800’s when he talked about a difference in degree vs a difference in kind. Like going from a gas to liquid is a difference in kind…kind of thing. Darwin said that the difference in mind from animal to man is great but not one of kind but one of degree.
Teleology and Consciousness
This is a fancy word for purpose. We start the argument by asking if the turtle comes ashore and lay its eggs or does the turtle come to shore TO lay its eggs. I find the best thing to do is just say evolution does not have a purpose…it just is…
Neuroanatomy of Consciousness
From a historical point of view, which again dates back to Plato, there are three brains in your head. You have your lizard brain low down in charge of food, fighting and sex (instinct). Then higher up you have the mammals’ brain is charge of emotion. Then at the highest level, you have the human brain in charge of rationality.
The trouble is that it is just not that simple. Not trying to sound too woo woo, it is not that simple because everything in the brain is connected to everything else. The mystics take this one step further to say everything in the universe is connected.
In medical school we had to memorize all sorts of ridiculous Latin sounding names for little spots in your brain which was the opposite of this holistic/everything connected to everything else thing. This memorization exercise was a giant waste of time unless, maybe, you were going to be a neurosurgeon.
The bottom line anatomically is that you can have a quarter of your brain cut out and still function. You can’t do this with your cell phone.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
Traditionally science…reductionist science…takes things apart and goes deeper from body to cell to biochemistry to chemistry to physics. The biologist Robert Rosen said that every atom in the human body changes completely every eight weeks through metabolism, repair, and reproduction yet you are still there with your memories and your consciousness. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said that if scientists chase these particles downward like this, they will follow them right through the organism and miss the organism entirely.
Now let’s just mention a few of these reductionist scientific tools that have allowed science to go neurologically deeper.
Optogenetics. This is where you can stick a protein on a neuron. This proteins is light sensitive. So if you blast some laser light on that neuron it discharges. This is really big because it allows science to move from observation to manipulation which is going from correlation to cause. Hopefully.
fMRI. This technology measures how brains light up during various experimental conditions one is looking at. Well it doesn’t really “light up”. It is just a proxy measure for how much blood is flowing in a certain area which is a measure of how much sugar is being metabolized which is a measure for brain “activity”.
Energy and Consciousness
Energy is a very strange concept. In high school you’re taught that is has something to do with that force thing that Newton came up with which is mass times acceleration. And then is you multiply that force by a distance you get something called work, which is energy. Then in university you’re taught that energy has something to do with vibration or frequency… like blue light is higher energy that red light because it’s frequency is higher. Then in grad school energy is all about symmetry between space and time which was the work of Einstein’s favorite mathematician Emmy Noether.
Now on our planet earth life came about shortly after the planet formed. There were these little tiny bugs floating around in water moving toward high concentrations of sugar and eating. All their power packs to do this was on the surface of each little bug. We still have that today in every one of the cells in our body. In every cell in your body there is a difference in the concentration of sodium and potassium on either side of the cell’s membrane of which means this is a battery. It is a battery that is about 90% efficient.
But these little guys couldn’t get bigger as all the power production was on the surface of our little bug. This is dependent on the area. But size is dependent on the volume. It’s an X squared vs X cubed thing.
Then something energetically amazing happened. A little bug ate another little bug that didn’t die inside the eater bug. It was used inside the eater bug as a power plant after it gave most of its DNA to have only the specialized function of providing energy inside the eater bug. Today we call these power plants inside every cell in our body, mitochondria. The little bugs could now get much bigger and much more complicated with organelles and nuclei and a lot of other stuff because they had these power packs inside the cell. These cells are called eukaryotes to distinguish them from the smaller prokaryotic bacterial sized cells that were around first. These cells despite being a billion times bigger couldn’t travel very far in water because they were still too small to overcome the viscosity of the water. It would be like a human swimming in molasses.
So then the energy innovation called multicellularity came along and things really took off. Fish, then reptiles started growing real big.
Then mammals who could energetically maintain a body temperature despite what the ambient temperature was, came along. And because the speed of chemical reaction doubles for roughly every ten degrees centigrade mammals took over the world. Mammals developed lactation which from an energetic point of view is like the Tour de France. Then human young could be born prematurely and grow their premature brain outside the mother’s body after birth. This brain complexity was consciousness.
The current thinking in neuroscience is that the brain is a prediction machine. It gets constant input from our senses and generates an internal model of reality. It is trying to minimize error. It is trying to allocate an energy budget. This is given the fancy name allostasis to distinguish it from homeostasis which is just immediate feedback that corrects errors. The creature that evolved to come out of the water with eyes could now assess tiger going this way and so it could go the other way vs the underwater blind organism that just reacted immediately or instinctually to a stimulus. It was going to eat or be eaten. There was no planning. Consciousness allows our mammal mind vs a worm’s to be driven by ideas rather than immediate stimuli.
Roger Sperry who won a Nobel Prize for all that split brain stuff said life's aim is an act not a thought. So the brain in his opinion is just a mechanism for more and more refined movement. That means that thinking and planning and remembering are simply more and more complex tools added in a layered architecture that has evolved to do nothing more, he said, than “increase robustness of motor control”.
Up until 550 million years ago biology did not need brains. But as things became bigger you needed brains for control of body movement. From an energetic point of view the most expensive thing you do is moving. You could throw in learning something new also here.
Just to throw in an explanation for the spiritual here to show you the other side of the physics and energy thing, you can see how in this world of ideas, from a Darwinian point of view, the brain was wired for religious thought before we were Homo Sapiens. There is in fact evidence that Homo Erectus buried its dead facing east and smothered in red ochre.
AI and Consciousness
AI is all the rage these days. Will AI will soon start thinking? Will AI will be conscious? Questions like this are just stupid. We…intelligent humans that is…. are made of carbon which has been molded by 4 billion years of biological evolution on this planet earth. A computer chip is made of silicon. The basic building block is a transistor. It is good at binary mathematics. The building block of HI is an analogue neuron which is terrible at math calculating. The brain doesn’t do math computations in a serial manner like a von Neumann architecture computer with huge precise memory. A neuron sort of sums up a bunch of inputs and either produces an output or not, but once that output has fired off down the axon it is gone…no precise memory in that individual neuron.
Evolution and Consciousness
The Ukrainian born biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.
So billions of years ago little wormy type organisms had the ability to move in a chemotactic water environment…they moved toward higher sugar concentrations…to eat. Then they got some eyes and came out of the water where there was less attenuation of photons than in the water and they could see farther and plan an attack to get food to eat. They realized they were in this environment…I guess this is being conscious?
This is a Searlean point of view named after the famous, and now infamous, philosopher John Searle of Chinese Room fame. He said that our consciousness is a specific biological phenomena that arose in tetrapods and cephalopods and humans just like the digestive system did or the eye did….in fact the eye arose thirteen times in evolutionary history supposedly. So consciousness is just a talent that evolution evolved.
Summary of Consciousness
So in summary, the science of consciousness has been pretty remarkable. And. Someday we might be able to stand on the leaning tower of Pisa like Galileo supposedly did, drop a ball bearing out of the left hand and at the same time a sparrow out of the right hand and explain the difference in flight path between the ball bearing and the bird when dropped. But at the present time we have no mechanistic explanation of how three pounds of biological meat on top of your shoulders gives rise to you being conscious or to your memory of your first kiss or to your feeling of being in love or . But science will soldier on.
So can you forget all the woo-woo stuff? Question Mark. The Apollo 11 astronaut Frank Borman in 1968 commented that the only thing that had colour in the universe he could see was Earth. Was this the conscious experience of color that he thought may not happen anywhere else. I dunno.
Here is a smattering of books in the off chance that you want more.
1)Any of Iain McGilchrist’s books…..One is particularly length but the theme is that the left childing, petulant left brain which is the basis of science is stupid compared to the creative cosmic right brain. All in all there is a much evidence for this conclusion as against it but he weaves are very erudite tale.
2)Any of David Chalmers’s books….there are a least five from this prof of philosophy who basically created the last twenty years of buzz around the “hard” problem of consciousness.
3)The Principles of Psychology by William James 1890
This book by the father of psychology invented the stream of consciousness metaphor. Old, but amazing when you consider how much effect this guy had….and still does.
4)The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes 1976
Jaynes says it all comes from language and metaphor starting in the 2nd millennium BC.
5)The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul by Dennett and Hofstadter 1981
The whole thing is all self reference and information processing.
6)The Hidden Spring: A Your Brain Is A Time Machine by Dean Buonomano 2018
Brains are better with space-evidence suggest that the brain or rather the evolution of the brain co-opted areas for space to understand time.
7)The Source Of Consciousness by Mark Solms 2022
This scientist took time out to become a psychoanalyst because he like Freud and thinks everything is based on emotions.
8)7 and a half Lessons About The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett 2021
Lisa is one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world who explains that the brain is just an energy allocator trying to predict error (allostasis) s vs correcting them (homeostasis)
9)Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner 2023
10)Being You by Anil Seth 2021
Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience but it is a “controlled hallucination”.
11)Any of Andy Clark’s books.
He is the guy who along with Chalmers came up with the extended mind metaphor but he latest writing is on the predictive machine otherwise known as the brain.
12)The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind by Michael Gazzaniga
Michael was a student of the Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry. In this work he comes down firmly on the science side saying consciousness is everywhere in the brain.
13)Anything by Douglas Hofstadter like the well known Gödel, Escher, Bach from 1979 or The Mind’s I from 1981 or I Am A Strange Loop 2007
14)Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey 2022
Lots of paradox…lots of semantic splitting of hairs…basically divides sentience and consciousness….perception vs. sensation
15)Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff’s 2019
Darn good philosopher.