Mirror

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency [in the results of all recent scientific research] has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed.

-- from One of Us by John Jeremiah Sullivan. See also Frans de Waal on The Brains of the Animal Kingdom:

Aristotle's ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right here on earth, under our noses.

Forest

Neurons are highly diverse and sophisticated processors that collect, process and broadcast data via synapses, or contact points with other nerve cells...Our nervous system has perhaps 1,000 trillion synapses linking about 86 billion neurons...

...To visualize the brain's staggering complexity, recall those nature specials where a single-propeller airplane captures the immensity of the Amazon rainforest by flying for hours over the jungle. There are about as many trees in this rainforest as there are neurons in your brain (this statement will no longer be true in a few years if the forest continues to be cut down at the current pace). The morphological diversity of these trees, their distinct roots, branches, and leaves covered with vines and creeping crawlers, is comparable with that of nerve cells as well. Think about that. Your brain likened to the entire Amazonian rainforest.

-- from Christoph Koch's Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist pages 16 and 117.

Koch suggests that consciousness is a fundamental, elementary property of living matter analogous to electrical charge. Now that really is an astonishing hypothesis.

P.S. 30 May: Another way in which brains are astonishing: Microglia: the constant gardeners. Neurons account for only about 10% of the cells in the human brain.

In-dividual

We are embedded in the mental world of others just as we are embedded in the physical world. What we are currently doing and thinking is molded by whomever we are interacting with. But this is not how we experience ourselves. We experience ourselves as agents with minds of our own. This is the final illusion created by our brains.

-- Chris Frith

image: from a model of water flow on ocean surface

The most endangered animal

The problem of consciousness confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense with it. For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could ‘act’ in every sense of that word, and yet none of all of this would have to ‘enter consciousness’. The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous? I may now proceed to the surmise that consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings and movements enter our own consciousness—at least a part of them—that is the result of a ‘must’ that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed ‘consciousness’ first of all, he needed to ‘know’ himself what distressed him, he needed to ‘know’ how he felt, he needed to ‘know’ what he thought. My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature.

-- so Nietzsche (1882). But Nicholas Humphrey, who quotes this passage (2007), argues against it:

The bottom line is that we are not a we. We are a set of I ’s, individuals who due to the very nature of conscious selfhood are in principle unable to get through to one another and share the most central facts of our psychical existence. Nietzsche was wrong. When it comes to consciousness, we are on our own: ‘soul’, ‘solo’.

...If I cannot even tell what seeing red is like for you, what can I tell! Imagine. We are walking together in the woods after the rain, dappled sunshine filters through the dripping leaves, a blackbird sings and the scent of honeysuckle permeates the rich air. It may be that shared moments like these are needed to give meaning to our lives—shared moments of consciousness. What then if we should realize how little we are truly sharing: that if truth be told each of us is merely colouring in the other’s consciousness as if it were his or her own?

Perhaps, Humphrey writes, "the tragedy of being human is the perpetual 'virginity' [separateness] of the soul." But, he concludes:

Instead of either running from the problem or trying to mend it, why not make the most of it? Just look what we’ve got here! If I myself have this astonishing phenomenon, known only to me, at the centre of my existence, and if (it is, of course, a big if) I can assume that you do too, then what does this say about the kind of people that we are? It is not just me. Each of us is a creative hub of consciousness, each has a soul [sic], no one has more than one. All men have been endowed by the creator with an inalienable and inviolable mind-space of their own.

We are a society of selves. The idea that everyone is equally special in this way is extraordinarily potent — psychologically, ethically and politically. And I dare say it would be and is highly adaptive. I believe it is likely to have arisen within the human community as a direct response to reflecting on the remarkable properties of the conscious mind. And from the beginning, it will have transformed human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and others’ lives. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it marked a watershed in the evolution of our species — the beginning of humanity’s interest in the human project, a concern with humanity’s past and humanity’s future.

(photo at top: Carcharodon megalodon and friend)

Spirits with Legs

The idea that gods and spirits got their start as a supernatural version of people encounters one obvious objection: In hunter-gatherer societies, aren’t some supernatural beings thought of as animals, not humans? And aren’t some supernatural beings—especially the ones anthropologists call “spirits”—too vague a life form to qualify as either human or animal? Why should we, along with [Edward] Tylor, talk of personified causes when Tylor’s own terminology—animated causes—would fit better?

For starters, however unlike a human a “spirit” may sound, when anthropologists ask people to draw pictures of spirits, the pictures usually look more or less like humans: two arms, two legs, a head. Similarly, a great god of the ancient Chinese was called Tian, or “heaven,” which sounds quite unlike a person—yet the earliest written symbol for that god is a stick figure: two arms, two legs, a head.

Even when a supernatural being looks like an animal — as those snowmaking birds of the Klamath presumably did — it doesn’t act like an animal. It may have wings or fur or scales, and it may lack various parts of a normal human being, but it won’t lack the part that explains why human beings do the things they do. As the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has observed, “the only feature of humans that is always projected onto supernatural beings is the mind.”

-- from an appendix to The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.

Overflowing

The moon is reflected on the river a few feet away,
A lantern shines in the night near [midnight].
On the sand, egrets sleep, peacefully curled together,
Behind the boat I hear the splash of jumping fish.

-- Du Fu


Image: brainbow

Sympathy

"These mirror-neuron experiments are showing that, through and through, the brain is a dynamic system not only interacting with your skin receptors, up here" -- he pointed at his own head -- "but with [the guy sitting opposite you..."Your brain his hooked up to [his]! The only thing separating you from [him] and me is your bloody skin, right? So much for Eastern philosophy." He laughed, but he wasn't joking. Ramachandran has dubbed mirror neurons "Gandhi neurons" -- "because," he said, "they're dissolving the barrier between you and me".

-- from Brain Games by John Colapinto. [1]

The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist their own bodies as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.

-- from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Minotaurasaurus ramachandrani

Footnote

[1] (added 26 May) but see Role of mirror neurons may need a rethink.

Between ourselves

Yes, the differences between Man and other animals are less than philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Nagel supposed, says Mark Vernon [1]; but that does not mean we should suppose there are no differences.

Rather, Vernon argues, it is a question of how we should recalibrate our understanding of the gap between ourselves and them; and moral and rational intelligence -- properties unique to humans -- are inextricable from linguistic ability:

a deeper understanding of what it is to be human can emerge from "somewhere between" the wolf and the philosopher.

Nick Lane sees it like this:

Language without feeling is bereft of meaning, but feelings exist, meaning exists, without any verbal language, as a core consciousness of mute emotions and wordless perceptions.

Some evidence indicates that forms of morality do too. As Deborah Blum writes in her review of Wild Justice:

[Mark Berkoff and Jessica Pierce] see moral actions as dictated by the behavioural code of social species, the communal operating instructions that bond a group safely together, the "social glue" of survival. They believe such codes are necessarily species-specific and warn against, for instance, judging wolf morals by the standards of monkeys, dolphins or humans.

Still, a "moral" decision can seem remarkably similar across many species.

Alasdair Macintyre argues that:

the virtues we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents, and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves and in others, belong to one and the same set of virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals, whose dependence, rationality and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other.

Footnote

[1] An article in a series titled Should we care about animals?

The totality of dogs

The flawed genius of language, the premier instrument of our collectivized consciousness, is to give us the ability to encompass in a virtual way huge territory that we could not otherwise experience or interact with. The central feature of language – that we seem to get hold of things via their general classes – is the key to this. When I say “dog” I do not take hold of any particular dog, but I have brought into play the totality of dogs available for my characterization. Thinking about this gives us a new angle on the venerable philosophical problem of universals – on the mysterious relations between singular objects and the general terms through which we take hold of them – and further, on what Slavoj Zizek has called ‘the violence of language’ (which, incidentally, licenses other modes of violence).

In short, properly reflected upon, knowingness and other shallows shine a light into the depths of our uniquely human consciousness, and upon the processes by which individually we make this world, that vastly outsizes us, our own place.

-- Raymond Tallis

Maps of dreams

Some old-timers, men who had become famous for their powers and skills, had been great dreamers. Hunters and dreamers. They did not hunt as most people now do. They did not seek uncertainly for the trails of animals whose movements we can only guess at. No, they located their prey in dreams, found their trails, and made dream-kills. Then, the next day, or a few days later, whenever it seemed auspicious to do so, they could go out, find the trail, re-encounter the animal, and collect the kill...

...Today it is hard to find men who can dream this way. There are too many problems. Too much drinking. Too little respect. People are not good enough now. Maybe there will again be strong dreamers when these problems are overcome. Then more maps will be made. New maps...

...None of this is easy to understand. But good men, the really good men, could draw dreams of more than animals. Sometimes they saw heaven and its trails. Those trails are hard to see, and few men have had such dreams. Even if they could see dream-trails to heaven, it is hard to explain them. You draw maps of the land, show everyone where to go. You explain the hills, the rivers, the trails from here to Hudson Hope, the roads. Maybe you make maps of where the hunters go and where the fish can be caught. That is not easy. But easier, for sure, than drawing out the trails to heaven. You may laugh at these maps of the trails to heaven, but they were done by the good men who had the heaven-dream, who wanted to tell the truth. They worked hard on their truth.

-- from the words of Dunne-za interlocutors of Northeast British Columbia as reported by Hugh Brody in Maps and Dreams (1981)

The feeling of happening to be

'Consciousness signature' discovered spanning the [human] brain.


A C Grayling recalls of John Locke's argument that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness, that memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore the loss of self.

Owen Flanagan summarises a thesis by Thomas Metzinger:

Our sense of self is a virtual simulation within a larger simulation of an external reality which is larger still..."What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there... The ongoing process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality."

If self is (mostly) illusion, a player in a theatre of virtual reality, how are the plays shaped for the future? Will 21st century religious and secular fundamentalisms believe in themselves as Lenin and his colleagues believed in themselves and the 'plays' they were writing in the 20th?:

It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

(images from here)

Future minds

Some day, perhaps, my biological colleagues will be using [computers] to simulate many processes including the chemical complexities within living cells, how combinations of genes encode the intricate chemistry of a cell, and the morphology of limbs and eyes. Perhaps they will be able to simulate the conditions that led to the first life, and even other forms of life that could, in principle, exist.

So wrote Martin Rees in a recent article [1].  But Rees, who is giving a talk on 23 February about the world in 2050, thinks that there is a long way to go before "real machine intelligence" is achieved. [2] I know of at least two grounds on which people question this. The first asks you to consider a continuum which extends far lower and higher than the upper and lower bounds of human intelligence, which for convenience are 'village idiot' and 'Einstein'. Machine intelligence (according to this argument) may at present be far below 'village idiot' and inferior, even, to an earthworm in important respects; but it is, or is soon likely to be, increasing fast and by the the time it approaches the lowest level of human intelligence it is likely to be traveling so fast that it will pass by both the lower and upper bands of human intelligence in a very short time. Further (the argument continues), we cannot say with confidence that this will not happen within a few decades. [3]

The second argument is that Rees is looking at the wrong thing. Very roughly speaking, the intelligence that is changing is that of extended mind or minds in which individual human brains are only a part. [4] New technologies are changing the nature of cognition and experience in profound and significant ways. The Minority Report-type technology of the kind shown below could be just a start.



Footnotes

[1] Mathematics: The only true universal language

[2] The example Rees gives in support of this assertion-- that a supercomputer may be able to beat grand master at chess but cannot recognise and manipulate the pieces on a chess board as well as a five year old human -- does not help build a strong case. See, for example, this from Conscious Entities.

[3] This is my very crude account of an argument outlined by Eliezer Yudkowsky at a conference on global catastrophic risks. The hope is for Gandhian AI. An intelligence without compassion could be like the psychopath mentioned by Daniel Goleman here. [Intelligence may be more than one thing in more than one dimension, or course.]

[4] See, e.g., A new kind of mind and Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind, alluded to at Out of Mind.

Baby Southern Keeled Ocotopus. Photo credit John Lewis

Jumping brains and scary monsters

It's long been observed that, as Michael Brooks puts it [1],

human brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world.

And Brooks does a good job in summarizing and contrasting analysis from Scott Atran, Justin Barrett and others doing useful research into this phenomenon.

This post touches briefly on just one point: the theory mentioned by Paul Bloom at Yale that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things on the one hand and inanimate objects on the other ("common-sense dualism"). It is argued, further, that strange things can happen when activity jumps between the two. I have made no proper study of this, but earlier today experienced the following.

Walking in the snow and slush through the local park, I half-noticed a dark blob smaller than a tennis ball on the path a few paces in front of me. Just as I was walking by I felt, as quickly as the involuntary reflex that withdraws a hand from a burning stove, a sudden shock of fear. In what seemed like the quarter or half second that followed, I attended to the object and saw it to be a stuffed cloth toy printed on the side with a picture of a blue tit or other small bird. It was a crude representation, obviously not alive and clearly harmless. [2] It had, however, been enough to spook me. [3]

My intuition is that as I approached the object (and I am aware that I had glanced at it few paces ahead) a system in my brain categorised it as inanimate, but that as I passed by the assessment changed: the object was registered as just possibly alive. The change was sudden and a sharp warning ran through my brain before closer inspection -- yup, it's just a dirty toy in the slush -- shut the warning down.

An evolutionary psychologist would say (I guess) that my ancestral 'wiring' was tripped for potential harm from, say, a snake or poison spider. There may be something to that. What struck me at the time, however, was a sense of flipping rapidly between two different mental states. Anyway, the experience seems to not contradict the idea that there are separate cognitive systems in the brain for living and non-living things.



Footnotes

[1] Born believers - how your brain creates god. See also A natural history of belief

[2] Unless, of course, Al Qaeda's Oxford franchise is planting IEDs inside wee cuddly animals toys.

[3] I think experiences like this are quite common.  P.S.: A friend writes with a simple explanation: "you are not getting enough sleep".

Kids and kin

When Ahla comes home in the evening after feeding, she will go...through a door to the lambs' enclosure. From here, she can only hear the adult animals but not see them. Once she hears from inside the voice of a lamb that is calling for its mother, she will retrieve the correct lamb and jump through the opening...and put it underneath its mother so it can drink. She does this flawlessly even when several other mothers are calling and several lambs are responding at the same time... She also retrieves lambs and brings them back even before mother and infant have begun calling. Mrs Aston [the farm's owner] noted that "No local personnel and no white person would be able to assign correctly the 20 or more identically looking lambs to the mothers. However Ahla is never wrong".

Ahla, explain Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth [1], was a baboon. According to their source, she was never trained to recognise the kinship relations between mother goats and their kids:

She does things that she has never observed and that she has never been told. Ocassionaly though, she was punished with a belt when for instance she took a lamb up into the top of the trees where she slept.

Footnote

[1] Baboon Metaphysics (2007). Cheny and Seyfarth record that goat herding with baboons was practiced by the Namaqua people before it was practiced by people of European descent in Southern Africa. Their source for the story of Ahla is Hoesch, von W. (1961) Uber Ziegen huetende Baerenpaviane. Other amazing baboon stories include Jack the Signalman.

Like mind

[It] is hard to say what is instinct in animals & what is reason, in precisely the same way [it] is not possible to say what [is] habitual in men and what reasonable. …as man has hereditary tendencies, therefore man's mind is not so different from that of brutes.

-- Charles Darwin (1838 a), quoted in Baboon Metaphysics (2007).

Interest in the idea of a herd mentality [in humans] has been renewed by work into mirror neurons - cells that fire when we perform an action or watch someone perform a similar action. It suggests that our brains are geared to mimic our peers. "We are set up for 'auto-copy'," says the psychologist Jonathan Haidt...[who] thinks this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause, though these tactics can be used just as well for peace, he stresses.

-- from How to control a herd of humans.

This notion of the autonomous individual who is in charge of his or her fate is one that I couldn't really subscribe to.

-- W G Sebald quoted by Will Self.

Hrönir

Conscious Entities puzzles towards a state of complete confusion:

...[Let us concede for a moment that] yes, OK, all that dust does have mental experience. But surely it only has the most tenuous and ethereal kind. To take another ridiculous example, suppose we were talking about an axe. Normally we require all the parts of an axe to be well co-ordinated in space and time, but we could have a dust-axe which was made up of different parts from different places and centuries. If we make the right selection of parts, we can have a series of axe-slices which even constitute its swinging and cutting wood. But it’s not really a very good axe; its existence relies completely on the support of our imagination, even though it consists entirely of unobjectionable physical items. Its existence is thin and dependent; it’s like the hrönir in the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, objects that exist only because someone thought they did. The experiences of the dust mind are almost as insubstantial as the experiences of fictional characters, or it seems as if it ought to be so.

But somehow I find myself reluctant to say even that much...

-- continued at Fear in a handful of dust?

Perhaps Borges's Thermal Beings -- 'entities composed solely of heat, from an earlier stage of the world's creation' -- would be closer to the mark.

Reflection, isolation

Our gregarious great ape cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas — along with dolphins and Asian elephants, have passed the famed mirror self-recognition test, which means they will, when given a mirror, scrutinize marks that had been applied to their faces or bodies. The animals also will check up on personal hygiene, inspecting their mouths, nostrils and genitals.

Yet not all members of a certifiably self-reflective species will pass the mirror test. Tellingly,...“animals raised in isolation do not seem to show mirror self-recognition.”

-- from an article on mirrors and psychology.