Vast Minds – A Bizarre Possibility of Physicalist Consciousness

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Disclaimer: The content of this blog post is outside the realm of current scientific knowledge. These ideas are meant as a fun exploration of possibilities, and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as life on other planets and alternate universes. 

Despite all of the revelations of science and philosophy, consciousness remains one of the universe’s most incredible mysteries. We have gone over several explanations of consciousness in this series, and in my judgment, physicalism fits best with the jigsaw puzzle of science. In particular, the version of physicalism that says consciousness is patterns of information in the brain. For this discussion, we will assume physicalism of this kind is true. (And remember, it has nothing to do with the q-word!)

Brains are made of neurons, a very simple machine. A neuron fires an electric pulse if it receives enough stimulus, and that’s it. But get enough of these simple machines together, and we get a system that exhibits conceptual models, self-awareness, free will, and consciousness.

If consciousness in the brain is a result of the collective information processes of neurons, then it stands to reason that if the same information processes happen in another system, such as a computer, that system will be conscious too; consciousness is substrate-independent. The unit of computation is the transistor, which behaves somewhat differently from a neuron, but wire enough transistors together and they can do anything a network of neurons can do. Thus, it should be possible to build a computer that is just as conscious as a human.

But here’s the question that comes to my mind: if we’re going to introduce the idea of substrate-independence to talk about conscious computer programs, why stop at computers? Drawing the line there seems just as arbitrary as drawing it at brains. A few adventurous thinkers extend the idea of substrate-independence to systems like billions of people standing in a field, raising flags or pulling levers. If these people can imitate the human connectome well enough, then this field of 80 billion people will be just as conscious as the human brain it is emulating.

So let’s be speculative pioneers and take this line of reasoning to its extreme conclusion. Let’s dispense with the idea of mimicking brains, and ask what kinds of sufficiently complex systems in general might be conscious? For instance, what about an ant colony?

Ants are not very smart creatures. For brains, they have only 250,000 neurons, which may not seem too shabby, but it is only .0003% of the 80 billion neurons humans have. These little brains can run programs to tell the ant where to find food, what task to perform, when to attack an enemy, and a number of other simple things like that. If an individual ant is conscious at all, its awareness is very limited, more of a mush of impressions and sensations than a thinking mind.

But what about the colony as a whole? The capacity for ants to build nests, gather resources, and wage wars is not in the individual ants, but in the collective actions of the colony. When ants come into contact with their sisters, they interact by sharing pheromones. This influences what each ant does next. The meeting between two ants is the unit of information sharing for the colony. Could the meetings of ants add up to information processing in such a way as to make the colony as a whole a conscious mind?

Ant colonies have between 500 and 10,000 ants. This is much less than the number of neurons an individual ant has. So it seems unlikely that an ant colony would be more conscious than an individual ant. But that conclusion is dramatic in itself; the very fact that known science does not dismiss outright the idea that an ant colony could be conscious if it had enough ants is mind-blowing!

Now that the door is open, let’s let ourselves loose and imagine the possibilities of consciousness in other collective systems. Perhaps the internet is conscious. After all, it is a network of sites and files and cookies and all that, which people and programs are constantly clicking through and changing. Perhaps the entire internet is one giant conscious mind, or maybe pockets of it are minds, like Facebook and YouTube.

What about more abstract things, like economies? The economy shares information through transactions, and every transaction influences future transactions and the overall state of the economy. Might an economy be conscious? Could our purchases, working hours, and business ventures contribute to the health and wellbeing of a living mind?

What about other complex systems? Might weather patterns be conscious? Ecosystems? In another discussion, we analogized ideologies, religions, and cultures as memetic organisms, propagating themselves through memetics rather than genetics. Might religions, ideologies, and cultures literally be alive and conscious?

It all seems absurd, and for all I know, the answer to all these questions is no. To the best of our knowledge, the only things in the universe that we can be certain are conscious are brains. But, consciousness is the least understood phenomenon known to science, and it may well be that once we understand it better, we start to find consciousness in all kinds of places we never expected.

Consciousness – Physicalism

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Recommended Pre-Reading:
Representational Realism
Existence and Natures
Knowledge of Reality
The Hard Problem

In the philosophical zombie thought experiment, there are two possible routes to follow. Last time, we explored what happened if we assumed p-zombies are possible, and something could exist that could act like, talk like, and be physically identical to a human, yet have no consciousness. It would follow that consciousness is something independent from, yet able to interact with, physical reality. Today, we are going to explore the other route, what we get if we assume something physically identical to a living human must be conscious, and it is impossible for it not to be. This is called physicalism.

For physicalism, we must suppose that something about the physical world is equivalent to consciousness. Right away, this seems weird. The way we conceptualize consciousness is completely different from the way we conceptualize physical systems. Consider light. Light doesn’t have any color, it’s just a wave in the universe-spanning electromagnetic field. In order to become color, it has to enter your eye, interact with the cells on your retina, be transformed into electrical signals, which make electrical patterns in your brain.

The physicalist must say these electrical patterns are color and shape and texture. The collection of neurons in your brain firing and buzzing together not only correlates with your consciousness, it is your consciousness.

This seems crazy. After all, if you think about a color, and you think about a bunch of cells shooting electrical pulses to one another, the two thoughts are nothing alike! In fact, they seem so different from each other that it feels like they must be fundamentally different things.

However, let’s remember that in analytical thinking, we might discover truths that go against our intuition. Last year, in the Nature of Reality series, we did a discussion on how we can know truth if our conceptions of reality are just representations. We concluded that if the math/logic of our conceptual representation is isomorphic with (the same as) the math/logic of reality itself, then our conceptual representation is true.

The models we create of physical systems, the images we draw and imagine and look at, are just representations. The picture in your mind of cells sending electrical pulses between each other is not reality-as-it-is, it is a conceptual representation. Consciousness, on the other hand, is not a representation. It is the direct experience of reality.

Let’s be clear. The computer you see in front of you is not a direct experience of reality. It is an image created in your brain. The direct perception of reality is the fact that you perceive an image, regardless of its contents.

This is important, so let’s go over it again. Consciousness is like the chalk marks on a chalkboard. Many things can be written on a chalkboard. They can be erased, and replaced by something else. You can write words or equations, or draw pictures. The things we write on chalkboards convey meaning to those watching. Yet all of it, regardless of what it means, comes from the chalk marks.

Your mind lets you experience many things. You see sights. Hear sounds. Feel feelings. These things are parts of consciousness. You find all kinds of meaning in the sights, sounds, feelings, and other senses. You can learn about the universe, keep a relationship going with another person, experience the imaginary world of a story. Yet all these things come from sights, sounds, and feelings. All these things come from consciousness. All the things we do with the contents of our consciousness are models, representations, not true reality. But consciousness itself, the sensations of sights, sounds, feelings, and other senses, is a little piece of direct reality.

When we apply this to the paradox of neural patterns and conscious experience, we find it is not so contradictory after all. The mental model of neurons and electrical pulses is just a representation, whereas consciousness is reality-as-it-is. If they don’t seem like the same thing to our intuitions, that is completely fine. It’s the logic and math that matters. If the math/logic of the model of neurons and electrical pulses is the same as the math/logic of consciousness, then those neural patterns are a valid model of the real system, which is consciousness.

If this is true, what does it mean metaphysically? To be conscious as we know it, a brain needs billions of neurons working together. A single neuron is about as conscious as a rock. The phenomenon of large numbers of things coming together and demonstrating new, holistic behavior is called emergence. The reverse of emergence, the process of examining systems in terms of their constituent parts, is called reductionism.

by Chlodulfa on Deviantart

If the conscious part of a brain can be reduced to neurons, what is consciousness reduced to? If consciousness and the conscious part of the brain are equivalent, then the same logic that reduces the conscious part of the brain must also reduce consciousness.

Does this mean what we said a moment ago about neurons and rocks is incorrect? Does it mean a neuron, despite being just one cell, is a tiny bit conscious? What about the things the neuron is made of? Molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles? If we say the fundamental physical level of reality has no consciousness, but brains do, then somewhere along the train of emergence there must be a step where the smallest possible building blocks of consciousness come into existence.

This idea, that somewhere along the hierarchy of emergent complexity the smallest units of consciousness appear from nothing smaller, seems non-scientific. Stuff doesn’t just pop into existence without any reason. One way to resolve this paradox is to say the fundamental level of physics and the fundamental level of consciousness are the same. Consciousness doesn’t magically appear at some level, rather it breaks up and keeps breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces the further down the physical reductionist ladder we go. When we get down to sub-atomic particles, we find that electrons, quarks, and the like all have a tiny bit of the stuff that comes together and makes consciousness. This would mean everything in the universe is a little bit conscious, a theory called panpsychism.

As the philosopher David Chalmers describes it, panpsychism contains the hypothesis that, just like electrons and other sub-atomic particles have properties like mass and electric charge, they have another property: a tiniest possible amount of consciousness. This wouldn’t be consciousness as we know it, with colors and concepts and perceptions, but a tiny bit that builds up and joins together with the other bits of consciousness from the other particles it interacts with, and in large enough numbers and the right organization, become the consciousness we recognize in ourselves.

Panpsychism isn’t the only physicalist option, though. If we can find a different ladder of reductionism to follow, we might end up at a place other than sub-atomic particles. As it turns out, matter isn’t the only dimension the universe can be reduced down. There is also information.

At the fundamental level of information, we find bits. Bits are things that can be one of two possibilities: on or off, yes or no, true or false, 1 or 0. It may be that any amount or type of information can be reduced to bits, or if not, to some other indivisible basis. So maybe consciousness can be reduced to bits.

By Christiaan Colen on Flickr

To me, this makes more sense than panpsychism. Consciousness seems to be correlated with information, not matter. Intuition would say a giant brain with the same number and configuration of neurons as mine should be exactly as conscious as I am, despite being made of a lot more matter. And if we could simulate a brain using electrons rather than cells, it seems to me like it would be just as conscious too. Of course, intuition can often lead us astray in science, especially when we’re talking about consciousness, so experiments would have to be done before we say anything confidently.

There is a scientific theory that looks into the possibility that consciousness comes from information, Integrated Information Theory. It looks at networks of information where each bit is connected to other bits, and changes based on the signals it gets. The brain is such a system, each neuron functioning as a bit, either firing an electrical impulse or not. According to Integrated Information Theory, consciousness is formed according to each state of the brain related to all other possible states it could be in.

Integrated Information Theory is a first step toward a scientific understanding of consciousness, but it is almost certainly not the whole answer. Just as Newton’s theory of gravity gave way to Einstein’s theories of relativity, Integrated Information Theory will probably give way to something much deeper and more insightful. Some avenues to pursue would be the time lag between signals and patterns passed along by neurons, and the fact that much of the brain seems not to contribute to consciousness, despite being very active.

Information is not something constrained to one universe or another. It is a mathematical construct, which means it transcends material reality. There is something deeply wondrous about the idea that consciousness comes from timeless, spaceless truths, made real by physical systems acting out their natures. Not from a religious or spiritualistic narrative, but from analytical thought and a scientific worldview.