`Theories of Everything' and consciousness

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 03:21:33 -0800
From: Louis Gidney <Louis4@cromer.demon.co.uk>
To: quantum-d@teleport.com
Subject: QUANTUM-D: `Theories of Everything' and consciousness

    > see LG's previous posting,
    > http://www.teleport.com/~rhett/quantum-d/posts/louis_12-11.html
    >
    >               - rhett

'What it is like for A to be conscious' is that 'something exists for A'.
 =======================================================================

I would like to put up the following speculation for discussion. It seems
to offer a strong clue to how systems must be constructed if they are to
support consciousness.

It depends on regarding consciousness as a case of `relative existence'.
So that: 'A is conscious of x'  becomes: 'x exists for A'.

'Relative existence' or 'existence-for' comes from re-thinking the basis
of physics approximately along the process ideas of A. N. Whitehead.  I
don't think much progess can be made on the 'hard problem', of how it is
that there is experience at all, without reinterpretting physics.

This involves deleting `absolute objective existence' from our vocabulary
while satisfying our conviction that the world is real and connected, by
envisaging it as a flux of pure activity which is non-substantial in its
essence - more like energy than traditional matter.

We then have to imagine that spatial extension and material particles
are produced by acts, within which they have only a relative (and
transitory) 'existence-for' each other but no absolute existence.  This
is not consciousness, but it is the germ within `matter' that makes it
possible for 'mind' to arise; for systems to be conscious - for something
to 'exist for' them.

The progression from this bare, undifferentated, transitory 'relative
existence' of a particle within the simplest quantum act, to all the
richness of human consciousness, involves an entropic principle such that
when the 'spontaneous' interactions between the parts of a system becomes
constant (or constantly repetitive), the 'relative existence' of the parts
to one another is neutralised/habituated, such that the formerly separate
'experiencing' of the parts merge into a unified experiencing activity
directed outwards.

If this view is sound, it would follow that conscious entities have to
be constructed in such a way as to take advantage of or 'concentrate'
relative existence in this way.

This would rule out the possibility that 'functionally equivalent' systems
of silicon chips could support consciousness, because the processing that
goes on in them does not have an intimate relation to underlying physical
processes.  However it does raise the intriguing question of what substances
and/or states of matter might would be suitable.

It seems to me that present understanding in this area is rather like the
state of electromagnetism before the discovery of the electric current and
the work of Faraday and Maxwell.  The principle described here at least
provides a 'handle' on how conscious devices should be made, which the
purely behaviourist Turing test does not.

One can envisage devices manifesting species of `relative existence' that
are not much like consciousness.  I doubt that the essence of consciousness
has anything to do with intelligence - artificial or otherwise, though
clearly some such appended means of communicating is necessary.

'Existence-for-others' and how Dualism arises.
 ============================================
Knowledge of physics (indeed all science) starts with experience and gives
results which have meaning in further experiences.  But it is exactly the
having of experience that consciousness is about.  Our concepts of what we
mean by `exist' and `real' are also derived from experience via centuries
of thought that may have gone astray and may now need revision.  So the
`hard problem' of consciousness is intimately bound up with our ontological
conceptions of the nature of the world and our place in it. (Schopenhauer's
'world knot').

Since we have been conditioned to a dualistic way of thinking by centuries
of use, the way out is intricate and delicate.  Because it is delicate, it
requires sensitivity. I have coined the term relative existence to evoke a
fresh return to observation of how we find the world to be in our experience.

Descartes' 'cogito' strikes me as contrived - not least because he was
adult.  Babies do not pop into life, look around, conclude 'I think
therefore I am' then proceed to ruminate on whether some of the objects
around them are conscious beings like themselves.

>From evidence of maternal deprivation, `wolf boys', etc, it looks as if
consciousness is not entirely an innate property of brains, but largely a
product of interaction with others.  Evidence from solitary confinement,
etc, suggests that interaction may even be needed to sustain consciousness.

If this is so, solipsism could not arise for if human consciousness,
unlike simple awareness, is a product of interaction between people, then
the world must come to exist for us in infancy as a shared experience, and
is public from the very start.

To regain an accurate ontological foundation for the sciences I think we
have to look very carefully at the kind of existence things have for us in
direct experience, including early experiences, and how we have proceeded
from there to where our scientific conceptions are today.

My own suggestion is that things as experienced are not primarily felt
to exist `in themselves' nor `for me'.  This comes later.  Rather the
mode of existence things have as experienced, might suitably be called
`existence for others' or `existence to others'.  This does not mean
that we have other people's experiences, but we do spend a lot of time
imagining how other people see things.  This gives those things what
some might call an `overlayer of meaning', and others might regard as
essential.

Either way it is a type of existence that is neither objective nor
subjective in its primary immediacy.  It may be seen as subsuming both
as special cases which have grown out of it:
  First `existence-in-itself' may be seen as that special case of primary
`existence for others' where the `other' in question is replaced first by
a supreme other; an all-knowing God, later by His secular carbon-copy: the
19c `impartial objective observer'. Either of these, bestows upon everyday
things an `existence feel' which is different from the purely personal one
out of which awareness grew in the first place. Nothing else in experience
(itself an activity) suggests the concept of absolute existence, or the need
for it.
  Second, subjective `existence for me' arises from the `for others' kind
only after appropriate socialisation of the individual (not the same in
all cultures).

If, as seems to me, a fresh and careful phenomenological analysis of
experience more or less deconstructs the concept of 'absolute objective
existence' then we have to find another way to satisfy our conviction that
the world is real and enduring.

Are there serious conceptual difficulties in rethinking the physical world
as essentially `process' rather than `existence' - along the lines of
A. N. Whitehead, William James, etc, with the benefit of more experimental
data than they had?  For if we can, then the conceptual scheme described
would embrace consciousness in an uncontrived and natural way

To what extent would we be guilty of anthropomorphism (and does it matter)
if we project onto nature the idea that the relative existence of one thing
to another can occur within fundamental physical processes?

After all we can't have it both ways: either we want to have a
" property of `matter' " that allows consciousness to arise from it, or
not.  I suspect that _if we don't put it in, we don't get it out_.
Evidently it is in there since we ourselves are conscious.

Summary.  According to the conceptual scheme outlined above, inasmuch
as a conscious subject is not an object (but in some sense its opposite)
no amount of signal processing complexity in an artificial brain object
can ever make it happen that there is something that `exists for' that
brain object, however it may behave or whatever it may report, unless the
natural `relative existence' inherent in physical processes is used and
made to `concentrate' in some sense.  These ideas provide a guideline to
work to, where we now have none, except for a semi-magical belief that by
imitating perceptual mechanisms somehow, complexity alone will one day
convert objects into subjects.

Louis Gidney   -    (louis4@cromer.demon.co.uk)