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.

Art and origin

The true cognitive depth to the palaeolithic sculptures – their challenge, ultimately, to our anthropological schema – seems to me the way they suggest how self-loss and self-consciousness were intertwined. The movement of the new world of representations was at least twofold. One aspect (and that I have concentrated on the little figurines does not mean I have forgotten, or mean the reader to, that the overall image-world of the Ice Age is oriented to the bison, the mammoth, the horse, the cave bear, the reindeer, the wolverine) involved the invention, by the look of it somewhat suddenly, of more and more ways to bring the realm of animals up close, imaginatively – into being, into movement. The painters and carvers seem to have been intent on staging and immortalising the human animal’s familiarity with – maybe its dreamed-of inclusion in – a world where the ‘human’ was only a small part of the show. 

– T. J. Clark

An illusion of being

Much of what we take for granted about our inner lives, from visual perception to memories, is little more than an elaborate construct of the mind. The self is just another part of this illusion.

And it seems to serve us well. In that respect, the self is similar to free will, another fundamental feature of the human experience now regarded by many as an illusion. Even as the objective possibility of free will erodes, our subjective experience of it remains unchanged: we continue to feel and act as though we have it.

The same will surely be true about the self. The illusion is so entrenched, and so useful, that it is impossible to shake off. But knowing the truth will help you understand yourself – and those around you – better.

-- Richard Fisher in one of a package of articles on the self, in which Michael Bond notes that the self is, in large part, a social construct.

Speak, memory

Twenty-second in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 14: Mystaceus

A version of this chapter was published by Aeon as Webs of Perception

page 201: Bagheera kiplingi lives in South America, not India

page 201: build a mental map. In a comment for the Aeon article Andrew Wilson writes:

Portia doesn't actually build a mental map; there is now strong evidence that its scanning behaviour is a real time perceptual strategy that allows it to look as if it's planning; see Chapter 4 of Louise Barrett's excellent book, 'Beyond the Brain'; the chapter is called 'The Implausible Nature of Portia' and has references to all the primary literature on this.

page 203: it is also possible to remember too much. A real life Funes was 'S', a Russian man described by A. R. Luria in his celebrated work The Mind of a Mnemonist (A little book about a vast memory). Luria writes:

[S] lived in wait [sic] of something that he assumed was to come his way, and gave himself up to dreaming and “seeing” far more than to functioning in life. The sense that he had something particularly fine was about to happen remained with him throughout his life – something which would solve all his problems and make his life simple and clear.

Thus [S] continued to be disorganized, changing jobs dozens of times – all of them merely “temporary.” At his father's bidding he entered music school; later he became a vaudeville actor; then an efficiency expert; and then a mnemonist. At some point, recalling that he knew Hebrew and Aramaic, he took advantage of ancient sources in these languages and began to treat people with herbs.

He had a family – a fine wife and a son who was a success – but this, too, he perceived as through a haze. Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him; the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest. 

page 203: steering a course between remembering too much and too little. See this:

According to [one] theory, our memories act as a kind of ballast that holds us steady during times of stress; they can suggest ways to solve problems and offer comfort when we are feeling wounded. When people find it hard to recall specific events from their past, however, they feel overwhelmed by life's challenges, which slowly pushes them into depression. "In the right circumstances, the effect can be striking," says [Mark] Williams... If the theory is right, there may be new ways of treating depression that directly target the underlying memory problems.

In Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator says:

No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past. That gift was never granted even to Shakespeare, so far as I know, much less to me, who was but his partial heir. A man's memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities. St Augustine speaks, if I am not mistaken, of the palaces and caverns of memory. That second metaphor is the most fitting one. It was into those caverns that I descended.

page 205: in its entirety, A Little Fable goes like this:

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Theridion grallator

An unknown

...My argument is [that] because we don't understand animal consciousness, we ought to be opening our eyes to the possibility that a great range of animals, not just mammals, not just birds, maybe invertebrates are conscious as well. It seems to me that by saying we don't understand consciousness, you're not closing off animals' consciousness. You're not denying animal consciousness altogether. You're just simply saying we don't know and therefore it might exist in a much wider range of animals...

-- Marian Stamp Dawkins

Thaumatrope

The more distant future of time research may change our views of other fields, such as physics. Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense. But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation. Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

-- David Eagleman

P.S. a cartoon about time.

Where be your quiddities now?

This is the heart of phenomenal experience: any one conscious experience is both highly differentiated from any other one but also unitary, holistic. The larger the phi, the richer the conscious experience of that system. Furthermore, the theory assigns any state of any network of causally interacting parts (these neurons are firing, those ones are quiet) to a shape in a high-dimensional space. The shape (think of it as a crystal in a fantastically high-dimensional space) accounts for the peculiar feel of any one conscious experience. If the network switches into a different state - you fantasise about sex rather than listen to a droning speaker - the crystalline shape changes as well.

This crystal is the system viewed from within. It is the voice in the head, the light inside the skull. It is everything you will ever know of the world. It is your only reality. It is the quiddity of experience. The dream of the lotus-eater, the mindfulness of the meditating monk, the agony of the cancer patient, all feel as they do because of the shape of the distinct crystals in a space of a trillion dimensions.

-- Christof Koch

Landscape of The Moon's Last Phase 1943 by Paul Nash

P.S. But is it the case that consciousness always only exists ultimately in relation to an external object? As Riccardo Manzotti tells Tim Parks, 'consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience.'

The Zone

Once I was a man, with a soul and a living body and now I am no more than a being...I hear and see, but no longer know anything...I now live in eternity. The branches sway on the trees, other people come and go in the room, but for me time no longer passes.

-- a schizophrenic patient as reported by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. The passage is quoted by Geoff Dyer in Zona.

The difference, perhaps, for sane humans in the Zone (which can be described as a place, or state, of heightened awareness to everything) is that, while we feel a sense of oneness with the Zone ('to be in the Zone is to be part of the Zone'), we do not altogether loose our sense of individuality. (The pain of individuality is, perhaps, what makes us sane.)  Even when we think we forget time we are still at experiencing it. Consciousness only exists in time.  Tarkovsky may be cinema's great poet of stillness, as Dyer writes, but his stillness is animated by the energy of the moving image.

Mind in life

Am also late off the block on this from Alva Noë:

Plants are living beings, even the simplest ones, even the cell, are already engaged in an autonomous struggle to maintain themselves and survive. Living beings, even the simplest ones, already have something like rudimentary minds — motivated sensitivities and useful interests — and so they are way beyond [the IBM robot] Watson.

A sixth sense

We can actually use other physical parameters that mammals do not normally perceive and create other sensory channels ...We create a complete new sense with a physical parameter, a physical energy that mammals never experienced themselves so they are now living in a complete new world that is governed by this physical energy, and they have a detector that allows them to find sources of water (for instance) based on this new sense.

-- Miguel Nicolelis talking to Nature Neuropod in October 2011 about yet to be published work that builds on work reported here.

'You are not your brain'

...we do know...that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

-- from Art and limits of neuroscience by Alva Noë

An octopus enrichment handbook

Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

-- Sy Montgomery

The world of living things

For Daniel Dennett a key realization of the Darwinian revolution is 'competence without comprehension.' [1] Some forms of intelligence do not require consciousness as we normally think of it. [2]

Darwin touches on this matter. "Some animals extremely low in the scale apparently display a certain amount of reason," he wrote after extensive study of earthworms; "a result which has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms." [3]

The study of cognition and the capacity to process information has come a long way and been substantially rethought since Darwin's time. Still, he would surely be intrigued that intelligence of a kind may be present in even 'simpler' life forms than the earth-worm. [4] As an article in New Scientist this week reminds us, it's been a decade since Toshiyuki Nakagaki reported that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum can negotiate a maze to reach food at the exit. This, Nakagaki wrote, "implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence". [5] He is, however:

unwilling to extend the notion of intelligence to an oil droplet recently observed 'solving' a maze. "It is nonsense for me to consider intelligence in non-living systems," he says.

Should we then draw a definite a line between living beings and the non-living world? NS reports a different tack from the philosopher Andy Clark, who says much of biology boils down to chemistry:

"The mere fact that it's just physical stuff doing what it does can't be a strike against the droplets. Whatever intelligence is, it can't be intelligent all the way down. It's just dumb stuff at the bottom."

...The droplet appears to be moving in an intelligent way because the aqueous environment surrounding the droplet is structured to such a high degree by the pH gradient that it makes the dumb droplet appear smart. "It's a neat demonstration of just how much problem-solving punch you can get from a minimal internal structure in a nicely enabling environment," says Clark

Humans rely on the same trick, says Clark. It forms the basis of the extended mind theory proposed by Clark and David Chalmers in the late 1990s. This holds that the division between mind and environment is less rigid than previously thought; the mind uses information within the environment as an extension of itself.


Footnotes

[1] See, for example Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" (2009)

[2] And neither do some forms of memory. For a very short introduction see Memories in Nature by Olivia Judson (2009)

[3] The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881). E. O. Wilson and others have arguably done for ants what Darwin did for earthworms. For example:

Even with a brain one-millionth the size of a human’s, an ant can learn a simple maze half as fast as a laboratory rat, and remember the directions to as many as five different destinations when she forages away from the nest. After exploring a new terrain, a worker can integrate all the seemingly haphazard twists and loops she made and, amazingly, return to the nest in a straight line.

[4] In Created from Animals: The moral implications of Darwinism (1990), James Rachels notes:

"The mental powers of worms"? It sounds like a joke. ...It should be noted, however, that Darwin's brief in behalf of worms was not part of some general campaign to attribute intelligence to all creatures, no matter how lowly. He was far too cautious for that. He regarded the matter as an open question, to be decided experimentally in each case. Darwin observed that other lowly animals do not show the same degree of intelligence as the worm.

[5] Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism (2000). More recently Nakagaki and his colleagues have shown that a slime mold can quickly build a network as complex as the Tokyo metro system. Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design (2010)


Image: (Teaching a stone to talk) Newgrange

Forams

The case of the three species of protozoan (I forget the names) which apparently select differently sized grains of sand, etc., is almost the most wonderful fact I ever heard of. One cannot believe that they have mental power enough to do so, and how any structure or kind of viscidity can lead to this result passes all understanding.

-- Charles Darwin, letter to W.B. Carpenter, 1872, quoted at Bowserlab

Foram shells are formed from a number of different materials; sand grains, calcium, sponge spicules and other foram shells are base essentials. Certain species – Astrammina rara, for example – demonstrate a deliberate (and quite staggering, I think) process of selection. They repeatedly select opaque sediment grains of a consistent shape and size, which they proceed to glue together to form a tight sphere. They complete their elegant structure with the addition of one larger red stone. Why is this? How do they differentiate scale and colour? Is it possible that uni-cellular organisms possess intelligence? A sense of aesthetic?

-- Claire Benyon (2009)

Attention

A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in the series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon. I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spider webs made invisible by the gathering dark, or to take a chance on seeing a carp, or scan the mudbank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying up-stream with their tails forked, so fast.

-- Annie Dillard (1974)

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

'More like rainbows and mirages than raindrops or boulders'

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception -- the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world...

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are drive to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality. The "I" we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this "I" notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware...

But our own unfathomability is a lucky thing for us! Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how miniscule we are in comparison to the vast universe in which we live, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our our creation -- categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

-- Douglas Hofstadter (2007)

'Grieving animals?'

Dan Sperber asks a question.

Time being

In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov identifies the precise moment that he became aware of himself as a sentient being. Aged four, he learnt his parents' age in relation to his own:

The beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time... I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. Once shared it -- just as excited bathers share shining seawater -- with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. [1]

Nabokov, a conjuror, may be telling the truth as he remembers it. But are command of language and number really necessary for a sense of time? In the 1940s and 1950s when he was writing comparatively little was known about animal cognition. We now know that some great apes, cetaceans and corvids are self-aware. With this awareness may come some sense of time. But it seems sensible to suppose that only humans have the "unique ability to envision large vistas of past or future." [2]

Footnote

[1] Quoted from the Penguin Classics edition. The syntax is the last sentence is confusing. Is there a verb missing?

[2] A phrase from a review of Eva Hoffman's Time

'The mental powers of worms'

[Darwin wrote] "If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and of their burrows, as seems to be the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they then act in nearly the same manner as would a man under similar circumstances."

Where we find animal behavior that is closely analogous to what we would expect from humans in similar circumstances, and where there are no experimental grounds for distinguishing between them, the animals must be regarded as intelligent, to at least some degree, if humans are so regarded. Anything else, Darwin thought, is illogical and unfair. The best proof we have of the seriousness he attached to this principle is that he would not depart from it even in the case of worms. Considered in this light, Darwin's discussion of "the mental powers of worms" turns out to be not just the crankish musing of an old man, but a telling choice of example.

-- from Chapter 4 of Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism by James Rachels (1990).