Most
books on consciousness, existentialism and epistemology drive me to
distraction. Ruminations that all of existence may be just an invention
of our minds, or of someone else's mind, and why nothing is knowable,
are enough to cause me to bash my head against the wall. I'm all for
philosophy and learning, but there comes a point at which ideas need to
be more than merely interesting, the subject of whimsical debate, and
need to become useful. Consciousness is, above all, a capacity for self-initiated action, for doing something. The time for pondering is past -- we need to know in order to act.
When we are all aware (or at least scientists, artists and philosophers
are aware) that civilization is on a collision course with
sustainability and the inexorable limits to growth, what can account
for the fact that we continue to behave as if we weren't aware of the
horrific consequences of our current course? What madness has so
gripped the collective psyche of the human species that we continue to
charge headlong to our own demise and that of all (but the
hardiest, which we are not) life on Earth? This is what I want to learn
when I read about human consciousness: How could we have got this way
and still be this way? Two books, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's 1997 Figments of Reality and Jay Ingram's Theatre of the Mind,
at least provide some insight into these questions, and hence are
useful reads. In this, the first of a three part essay, I summarize the
first half of Figments of Reality.
The thesis of Figments is laid out in its preface [definitions in square brackets are mine]:
Our
minds co-evolve with everything that influences them. Minds are
figments [fabrications, representations] of reality, processes going on
inside structures made from ordinary matter whose behaviour evolved in order to
mimic, model and manipulate natural processes. This explains why they
are 'unreasonably effective' at perceiving and reorganizing the
environment. The human condition is a complicit interaction between
culture and individual minds, each shaping the other.
Culture
depends upon communication, which we achieve with language. Language,
the first step towards extelligence [collective intelligence]
co-evolved with brains and made minds, complicit with hands and
technology, and the discovery of patterns and laws. Mind can only think
about mind once language equips it with a recursive, self-referential,
feature-detection system. Once it has this, self-awareness
['consciousness'] is an immediate, essentially trivial property,
because 'self' is a feature too. The existence of features
[properties, attributes and characteristics] makes it possible to
employ a mental map instead of the real territory.
Such original, lucid writing makes Figments
a startling, challenging, and exhilarating read. The book begins with a
history of the universe, and how it gave rise to consciousness and
concludes with a delightful and imaginative re-telling of this history
'translated' to the lyrical, cognitive language of an intelligent alien
species studying Earth -- history as the inevitable, intentional
realization of matter's potential, as "the unreal ocean of
possibilities collapsing into tiny puddles of actuality". The authors
are scientists and also sci-fi writers, and this unearthly epilogue is
an entirely credible alternative theory of creation from the
perspective of creatures who simply perceive very differently from the
way we do, using a different 'language', and its plausibility is both
entertaining and illuminating.
The authors start at the
beginning, exploring various theories of random walk and emergence to
explain the appearance of living organisms on Earth, and
self-organization to explain evolution and symbiosis. The evolutionary
adaptation of protecting a small number of 'privileged' young from
predators instead of just producing a large number to sustain both
their numbers and their predators', could be, they argue, the
justification for the emergence of mind, self-awareness, consciousness.
The authors chastise science for its passion for reductionist
models and 'theories of everything' and proffer instead contextual
models, which do not produce the 'reductionist nightmare' of infinite
complexity -- so many variables that cannot be reduced by rules or
formulae that descriptions become impossible and answers unknowable.
They then introduce the 'contextual' concepts of 'simplexity' (perhaps
what Dave Snowden refers to as 'the simplicity on the far side of
complexity') -- simple rule sets,
like those of flying flocks of birds, that can explain but not predict
infinitely complex outcomes; and 'complicity', the integral
consequences of mutual interaction among two or more complex systems,
consequences different from those that would come out of any of the
complex systems alone. They argue that complicity is the driving force
of evolution and that most natural systems are complicit -- beyond
complex. The consequence of complicity is emergence, not susceptible to
reductionism. Simplicity and complexity are, of course,
context-dependent concepts: Obeying the law of gravity is a simple
concept between two bodies, but a complex one among two billion.
Imagine
a game of billiards, the authors suggest, in which pockets appear and
disappear, change size, move depending on which ball is potted in them,
and spit balls out, and in which balls change colour, size and shape
under different circumstances. This, they say, is how simplicity and
complexity succeed each other, how simplexity has led to complicity,
and how evolution has played out on Earth. The emergence of the
protection of 'privileged' young was just one 'move' tried out in this
complicit 'game', one that worked so well that it co-evolved
consciousness to try out other 'thoughtful' moves.
Evolution
is thus a "self-modifying game in which the rules depend upon the state
of play" -- perhaps, too (though the authors don't say this) a
self-perpetuating, self-regulating game that ejects unruly players. Its
objective is to stay in the game -- and perhaps (though the authors
don't say this either) to prolong the game by keeping as many players
with different strategies in it as possible, as long as possible. The context
of evolution is ecosystems (and in a broader sense, Gaia), and in
different contexts the play of the game has evolved differently.
But
the constant adaptation to ever-changing rules by successful creatures
leads to a propensity for ever-increasing, astonishing complexity (so
much so that doctors trying to understand our bodies will be forever
playing catch-up) except in rare cases where a simple adaptation
obviates the need for previous excessive complexity. Or as the authors
put it humourously: "if it ain't baroque, don't fix it".
They then introduce this general evolutionary principle, a Murphy's Law variant:
If
the potential is sufficiently accessible and the advantages that will
accrue from realizing it are strong enough, then evolution will
eventually come up with some form of the necessary trick.
Some
'tricks', like haemoglobin and flight, seem to have occurred often, in
different circumstances and contexts; the authors call them universal evolutionary innovations and believe they are inevitable developments in the evolutionary process of life. Other, parochial evolutionary
innovations like backbones and chlorophyll, seem to have occurred once
uniquely; if evolution were to start over in the next century after
some catastrophe, the authors say, these would be unlikely to occur.
This is the most contentious argument in the book, and it carries a huge burden: Stephen Jay Gould argued convincingly that all
evolutionary adaptations were parochial, accidents of circumstance and
trial and error, with next to zero probability of recurrence. The next
evolution of life, here or elsewhere, would be so different from what
we think of as life as to be probably unrecognizable. The authors not
only disagree with this, but assert that intelligence and consciousness
are universals, destined to recur in every evolutionary sequence sooner
or later everywhere, every time around. Their support for this is that
intelligence has evolved in different ways at different times in very
different species at different times in Earth's evolution.
I'm
still deciding what I think of this. It's awfully convenient to argue
on the one hand that intelligence is everywhere but on the other that
human intelligence is somehow 'different', unique.
I'll have more to say on this in Part Two and Three, coming soon.
(Part Two of this essay will conclude my overview of Figments
with an explanation of how and why human intelligence evolved, and how
it got us into the mess we're in now; Part Three will discuss Theatre of the Mind, a new book on consciousness, and integrate its theories with those in Figments)
Painting
above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in
1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
