What is it like to be a duck?
Our consciousness deceives us. Being a duck is actually quite easy. What is it like to be a digital camera, though?
Taking a break from the fiction writing for the moment, I want to just talk about the things I’ve learned about consciousness that you might find interesting.
First let me outline the ground rules, the worldview that colours my lens of everything:
I don’t believe in a duality or a separation between consciousness and physical reality
I believe that consciousness is in some way a result of things which occur in spacetime, specifically in the brain (well, in humans case)
I don’t believe in the existence of a soul, but that’s not really relevant anyway since it’s not something I can scientifically measure, as far as I know
Consciousness is not the same as intelligence
Consciousness doesn’t include or require emotion, like fear or love or anything
Consciousness doesn’t include or require the experience of pain
It is possible to be unintelligent, unemotional, unable to sense pain, *and* conscious all at the same time
Not everyone will agree with the above of course, these are just my own personal views of the world as of this writing.
Oh, yeah, and ducks are pretty cool too.
Why ducks?
The question “What is it like to be a bat?” is an old and famous one in the field of conscious research. It comes from the title of a paper by Thomas Nagel, first published in 1974. It very succinctly puts into words something which has forever been so difficult to describe: what are we trying to understand about consciousness? In fact, what is it, really? What we are seeking is an understanding of what it is like to *be*, or a way to describe and explain the experience of being, without being confined to our own human experience. However, simply because I personally prefer ducks, I am going to change the bat to a duck and that is that. This of course begs a question: how can one know what it is like to be a duck, if one is not a duck?
This approach might actually be going about the whole thing in the wrong direction, from the outside → in, beginning with physical laws and ending at consciousness. This has historically been the approach taken, and it has proved exceedingly difficult to reach a point where we can make any sort of prediction about conditions which bring consciousness about - whether the duck is conscious or not - that can then be tested and verified experimentally. Every attempt we make seems to run into the Hard Problem of Consciousness, like a brick wall: *why* would this thing, this system, this whatever, have conscious experience? Why wouldn’t it? If something is capable of doing everything a human can do cognitively and behaviourally, but is not human, is it necessarily conscious? (This leads into something called “Philosophical Zombies”, or P-Zombies, which is a whole other rabbit hole we won’t go into here)
What if we tried going the other way around? To start with conscious experience axioms - e.g that it exists, that it has structure, that it is irreducible, and so on - and moving outward to identify what physical systems are required to explain them is the approach taken by my favourite theory of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Despite the awkward and dry name - and already being at least 20 years old - it is truly a breath of fresh air in a field that has grown very musty and stale, stuck behind the Hard Problem for so long. Is it strictly necessary to solve the hard problem? Maybe not!
[Integrated Information Theory] offers a mathematical framework to characterize the cause-effect structure specified by all the mechanisms of a system from its own intrinsic perspective, rather than from the perspective of an extrinsic observer.
- Albantakis L, Tononi G. The Intrinsic Cause-Effect Power of Discrete Dynamical Systems—From Elementary Cellular Automata to Adapting Animats. Entropy. 2015; 17(8):5472-5502. https://doi.org/10.3390/e17085472
Through the conscious looking glass
My current understanding of consciousness, when boiled down and over-simplified, essentially says that it is the integration of various streams of information together which provide a multi-spectrum view of an environment, where the inputs serve as guidance to the brain on the level of accuracy of its inner predicted model of how the environment should be at any given moment. We do believe that what you are experiencing when you see, hear, touch, taste, etc, is not technically representative of the information as it arrives at the relevant modules of the brain. Instead, the brain maintains a continuous prediction - a model - of the state of our selves, our body, as well as the environment around that body and of other things in that environment. Ultimately, the inputs from the nervous system and senses can either validate that model’s prediction, or provide a correction which is then used to make the necessary changes to the model.
Without this look-ahead predictive model we would have several issues. Firstly, the time it takes for different signals to reach the brain from different areas of the body is, well, different, simply due to distance. None of the sensory information streams would be in sync, and everything would be disjointed. We would have much slower and delayed responses to things. When we see a ball travelling through the air towards our face, the brain jumps ahead to predict the path of the ball, determines that it is a possible threat of injury to the head or face, and immediately signals to the body that it should begin evasive action away from the predicted path of the ball. As a former skateboarder, there were occasions when I remember distinctly seeing the predicted fall, especially when it seemed inevitable, before it occurred.
What IIT seeks to bring to the very large “theories of consciousness” table is some mathematical formalism and rigor in what has long been the slipperiest of concepts. The words I use to describe what I think of as conscious experience are vague and murky. A theory like IIT seeks the concrete and the testable. It’s what all theories of consciousness should be seeking.
Is Integrated Information Theory the perfect theory of consciousness? Nothing can be. So far I have not seen it explain why signals from the body can be *felt*. Then again, all of our current accepted theories about the world are merely the most accurate approximations we have come up with so far. Eventually, they are all replaced by something a little more accurate. Sometimes it feels like Zeno’s paradox, but that’s something we must all accept about knowledge in general: it can only ever be an approximation, and never absolute. To be absolute is to be the thing which is being described. In the case of knowledge, we travel only by fractions, and never whole numbers.
IIT has many critics as well as proponents, and it is this debate that sharpens and hardens theories, improves them, and takes us all further.
Before we get to the fun stuff, I need to give you as much of the important parts of theory as I can, much of which will probably be quite dry, but I’m fairly certain it will all be worth it.
2 + 2 = Consciousness
First we begin from inside conscious experience. One thing I can axiomatically state is that I am having an experience right now. This experience includes the visual perception of these lights in front of me, forming the shapes of letters and words, more appearing in response to my physical interactions with the buttons of my keyboard, which I am also perceiving visually as well as by touch and memory, and so on. I can take that as true. This is the part about Intrinsic Existence, our first axiom as defined by IIT: consciousness exists, and exists from its own natural perspective, and independently from any external observer. However we’ve also ventured into the second axiom: Composition. Experience is made out of multiple distinct phenomena; so my perceptions described are each distinct. Light, shapes, letters, words, physical surfaces, buttons, keys, keyboard, and there is a clear cause and effect between my pressing down on a key to the appearance of a new letter in my visual field.
The next of our list of Axioms is listed in the Wikipedia as “Information” (but the way it is described sounds more like “Specificity” to me). It states that experiences are differentiable and specific, being “the particular way it is”, and are composed of other specific and differentiable phenomenological experiences. So my experience from before includes lights, letters, words, buttons, keys, keyboard, as opposed to not having one or more of those things, which would make a different experience. Seems a little round-about, I know, but remember we were seeking formalism and rigor! Roundabouts just happen to be very uhh rigorous.
The last 2 axioms are that of Integration - that each experience is unified and irreducible, and despite being composed of many phenomena, the experience itself is not merely a collection of phenomena but one whole phenomenological experience, the result of the sum of parts and not the parts themselves - and Exclusion - which is kind of like the “Information (Specificity)” one, but explicitly states that this experience is my experience, and that there are many like it but this one is mine.
Ok, super. I think we can all agree on the above. If you are a conscious being, then that experience of consciousness should match up with those axioms. Now what?
You cause, I’ll affect
So the axioms are a way to describe the things which are consistent and regular about conscious experiences, but ultimately, the purpose is to find a way to explain them, and IIT aims to do this by identifying the “underlying causal systems” with the same properties: existence, structure, differentiation, unification, definition, and thus, “a physical system, if conscious, is so by virtue of its causal properties”. So, if we can describe physical systems with the same properties and derive a measure of consciousness from them that we can use to predict conscious states - like awake, asleep, unconscious, anaesthetised - we might very well have something.
So lets talk about systems. A system can be feed-forward, where the output of one system can be the input of a different one and so on. This is a uni-directional cause-effect process, where one thing affects the next, but not the other way around. Then, there are systems whose output is used directly as input to itself. It needn’t be the only input, either: it can be one of a multiplicity of various inputs. This is where the system itself can be a cause for its own effects.
According to IIT, it is this factor - a system receiving multiple inputs, including its own previous output - which makes a system truly integrated, and thus, conscious. This is a system with cause-effect power: it can cause things to be affected. It can even use its own cause as an effect over itself, and change itself.
By this point, you might be starting to see where I’m taking you with this.
The concept that underwrites the postulates of IIT is cause and effect. It is the key property upon which existence is defined. If we are to have an experience which exists intrinsically, there must be elements which exist intrinsically that form the constituent parts of a system which also exists intrinsically, or “a system of elements in a state”. You *must* have things, and those things must work together to constitute a system made of things. That system must also have cause-effect power over itself, independently of any factors outside of itself. That is to say, it must be able to create some cause that produces an effect upon itself. Wait, that was just adding more words to the previous sentence. Perhaps I’ll put it this way: the system must be able to operate itself. There. Like I wrote earlier, this is about the ability for outputs of the system to become inputs of the same system.
You can probably get a sense of this yourself. Do you ever feel anxious, or uncertain, and attempt to pump yourself back up by saying out-loud “You can do this!”
Do you ever recite shopping lists or phone numbers when reading them, to help ensure they get embedded in memory?
Do you look up guides on how to do things like crochet and then follow them, learning as you go?
In fact… do you think? Ah ha! See in all of these examples, you are taking a chosen action whose outcome can feed back into your mind as input. Cause: decision to take a chosen action. Effect: action taken, the result of which serves as cause again, whose effect is: self-encouragement, or memorising information, or performing a new task as part of learning a new skill.
The inner voice - the self-narrative - often serves as useful input as well. The narrative is itself an output of the mind system, it is an effect, but an effect that can cause other effects in the mind system again, looping back in. This is in fact the process of thinking. Thought can occur with or without language; in humans, there is a predictive model of the universe (relative to the mind’s model of the self) whose predictions can then be fed back into the mind as input and cause further actions, like dodging the ball predicted to intersect with one’s own face.
The space in which it exists is described by a set of sets, essentially a mapping between all possible causes and all possible effects.
All this is to essentially say that if a system meets these basic requirements, it must be, by very definition, conscious.
So that must mean… there is so much more consciousness out there than we realise.
To Be Continued…
This is turning into a very very long post, and so I think I must split it up into 2, and share with you at least this first half so that you can see that I am indeed writing! It’s just taking a little longer than I first expected.
In Part 2, I will take you through these conclusions and what they mean, and I expect you will either scoff at me and say “This is just magic and woo in the guise of mathematics”, or your view of reality will be changed forever.
Thank you for reading, it is an absolute pleasure getting to share with you these wanderings into the depths of the brain. I hope you’ll be back for Part 2, because we’re going to have a lot of fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw4c5RhRYMY
Ducks in flocks or solitary ducks? Ducks in the wild or in suburban back yards?