"The Mystery of Consciousness"

Each of us (and, we suspect, you), when awake, is aware of ourself. We each have a perpetual narrative running through our head, inter-relating this day’s sensory inputs, thoughts, and events to ourself and to those in the past, and projecting possible story lines for the future. In other words, we are conscious. Anne’s story differs from Paul’s, and yet as far as we can tell, our two stories have many similarities, especially in the area of values. We share our views with each other and our daughter and thus have a family culture. We share our views with friends and colleagues as well and thus participate in ever more broadly defined subsets of American culture, and ultimately, human culture. Another way to view cultural evolution is the changing pool of stories being narrated in the brains of human populations, just as their changing pool of genes constitutes genetic evolution.

The most mystifying thing about our brains is how the many trillions of connections among neurons bathed in hormones generate those narratives that we think as “consciousness.” British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has developed an intriguing speculation about the evolution of consciousness. He, like many neurobiologists, ties consciousness to bodily sensations – the presence of mental representations rich with “feeling,” of “something happening here and now to me.” Sensations contrast with perceptions, which are bits of news without emotional content about “what’s happening out there.” The distinction is a fine one. The chemical exuded by a rose, for example, is perceived as having a sweet scent, but it also given a person the sensation of being sweetly stimulated and may elicit further sensation of, say, being with a lover. Humphery’s hypothesis is that sensations occur at the boundary between an organism and its environment and in human beings are generally registered as sight, touch, sound, smell and taste. When direct sensations are absent, mental representations are accompanied by reminders of sensation; for instance, some thoughts are “heard” as quiet voices within the head and would fade without that component of sensation.

To explain consciousness, Humphrey constructed a hypothetical physiological mechanism based on sensory feedback loops – nervous responses that are returned to the sites of nervous stimulation – a view supported by a variety of observations of nervous systems. But many of his claims can be tested only subjectively, and subjective testing may well not be a reliable guide to what actually is occurring. Do you hear some of your thoughts? We think we hear many of ours. We also seem to see many of them, visualizing them as in our dream, although language is certainly lurking around the edges of even our most vivid pictorial representations. Do you find it hard to retain an imagined visual image of, say, a forest fire with looking at a cloudy sky? We do; the lack of sensation of heat and color make it hard to retain consciousness of the fire.

Humphrey’s short summary of consciousness is not the famous “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) of Rene Descartes but rather “I feel, therefore I am.” He reinforces that view with a quip from the novelist Milan Kundera: “I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.” In Humphrey’s view, there has been a gradual evolution of consciousness through a shortening of the sensory feedback loops. Originally, among our very distant ancestors – say, a simple worm – the input of sensation from the organism-environment interface triggered a nervous response to the stimulated part of the body surface. Then, gradually through evolutionary time, that circuit area on the surface of a slowly evolving nerve center, which eventually became a brain. Nerve impulses arriving in the brain created conscious experiences. It seems a plausible evolutionary story, but it’s at most a starting point for thinking about how consciousness evolved.

It seems reasonable to believe that conscious awareness of some sort must also be pretty widespread, at least in mammals and birds. Ravens, crows, and their relatives, for instance, show considerable ability to solve problems they face – such as finding a way to stopper a drain and restore a puddle in which to bathe. One imagines they can consciously picture the solution to the dilemma and then fix it and enjoy the result. And chimpanzees, with their sense of self and ability to learn from one another, surely have a form of consciousness – perhaps a narrative at the level of “see Fido, see Fido run, see Fido run after the ball.” But we suspect that today only human beings have what Paul has described as “intense consciousness”: “we analyze our physical and social surroundings, remember past events, and ‘talk’ to ourselves about those analyses and their meaning of our future. We have a continuous sense of ‘self’ n- of a little individual sitting between our ears – and perhaps equally important, a sense of the threat of death, of the potential for that individual – our self – to cease to exist.”

That intense consciousness, which Humphrey wants to explain, is what scientists call an emergent property, and emergence is a phenomenon that is just beginning to be investigated. It is the appearance of unanticipated patterns, such as traffic jams with no apparent cause, when large numbers of relatively small units – sand grains, automobiles, or nerve cells – interact in a regular manner (according to the rules of the road, for example) under the influence of a flow of energy (often fluctuating regularly). An emergent property can’t be predicted from the properties of the individual unit. Neurons can’t think, and (as far as we know) they aren’t conscious. But in a brain, billions of them constitute a complex self-organized system (one that isn’t directed by an outside entity), and vast mobs of them working together can think and somehow generate what we call consciousness.

Arguably the most basic ethical issue considered by human beings relates to the emergent state of human brain that we call consciousness (as opposed to the ideas it develops). It is the classic issue of free will, about which ideas have been evolving culturally for millennia and which can hardly be said to be fully understood by anyone. The question is: if the brain is an organic “machine,” subject to the laws of nature and constructed by an interaction between genetic material and complex physical, chemical, and social environments, aren’t all human behaviors simply programmed responses to those factors? Indeed, weren’t they all preordained from the moment of the origin of universe? Should any one, then, ever be praised or blamed for her behavior?

We would not pretend to have a pat answer to this ancient question. Our view is relatively simple. Our minds are a function of our brains, which have been formed by an interaction of inherited genetic “instructions” with environmental information both in the womb and throughout postnatal life. This is an ongoing process, which in a social context means a constant dialogue with others and continual observation of events that lead to a constant updating of our views of the past, probabilities of future events, our opinions of others, and other ethical views. We learn the evolving norms of our social groups and adjust our views of what we will and (perhaps more important) what we will not do in various situations.

The world interacting with our brains is not totally determined (e.g., one cannot predict when any given radioactive atom will decay), and it seems reasonable to assume that our social behavior is not all preordained either. The question of how much of our activity is in some sense automatically programmed (evidence from new imaging techniques indicates that our brains can decide on many actions before we become aware of the decisions), or “constrained,” and how much is “free” remains a philosophical one. But in many if not most cases we apparently can override automatic decisions, sometimes to act “responsibly.” Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga said that “the brain is determined, but the person is free.” Intriguing, but, like many statements about freewill, not totally helpful. Our brains are product of genetic evolution, key to the evolution of our complex culture, and the organ responsible for our global dominance. But scientists, and perhaps philosophers, have a long way to go even to approach a full understanding of them. ~ Pages 83 to 86

I have found that when I bring up the question of consciousness in a scientific context people are apt to make a great meal out of difficulties of defining it -- often with the intention of stopping what they see as a fruitless conversation ('if you can't even say what you are taking about, well.....). But surely these people must be playing some sort of intellectual game. They must know what consciousness is: what you lose under anaesthetic or when deeply asleep; what you regain more or less gradually as you wake up.....

Indeed it is difficult to find a crisp definition of consciousness, as it is difficult to fine one for, say, life. If by 'life' you mean life in all its detailed richness then this cannot be encompassed in a crisp definition. Yet (now) life can be understood as a product of evolution through natural selection. That provides us with a general definition, but of a kind that only became possible, because it could only make sense, after Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace and others had discovered evolution and started the lines that led to our current understanding of it. ~ Page 153 Excerpt: Evolving the Mind - Author A.G.Cairns-Smith

Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism, within body bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events in its environment, or, for that matter, by thoughts and by internal adjustments of the life process. Consciousness emerges when this primordial story -- the story of an object causally changing the state of the body -- can be told using the universal nonverbal vocabulary of body signals. The apparent self emerges as the feeling of a feeling. When the story is first told, spontaneously, without it ever having been requested, and forevermore after that when the story is repeated, knowledge about that the organism is living through automatically emerges as the answer to a question never asked. For that movement on, we begin to know. ~ Page 31 [Excerpt ~ “The Feeling of What Happens” - Author -- Antonio R. Damasio