There are many theories of consciousness and it seems to me that none of these theories is precise in articulating what consciousness is. Is life a requirement of consciousness? Is a single cell that demonstrates pain avoidance conscious – or just alive? When a roach runs from the light, has it made a conscious decision? Is consciousness simply self-awareness and if so, how is that demonstrated? If an animal is aware of self when looking in a mirror by trying to remove a spot on its face, is it conscious? Are there levels of consciousness? Are the building blocks of consciousness sequential, stackable and/or or interlocked?
One of the puzzles that usually arise from discussions of consciousness is the question of ‘mind’; particularly in regard to how it relates to the brain. This seems to me a non-issue as I see the mind as merely the product of the brain. (See Below) As such, it has unity, but no substance. The nearest analogy might be speech, which also has coherence, but no substance. The analogy is not total since in speech the brain uses a part of the body (vocal cords) to be productive while the mind requires no other part of the body but the brain. The brain is almost more of a conundrum since the brain cannot function without the constant communication with the outside environment and inside from the rest of the body through the senses.
The senses, after all, are the first requirement of life. Only as the entity ‘senses’ the outside can it really be said to be alive. It would seem that the first sense to come into being with life is the sense of touch – life ‘feels’ its presence in the space. Almost simultaneously life must ‘recognize’ [become aware] of its presence and the presence of its environment. Like two sides of the same coin, sensory input and recognition (awareness) occur together. But almost immediately after recognition, life is caused to analyze, interpret and judge the environment, for if it does not, it may not survive. Life has a simple rule of thumb, if it is painful move away, if it is pleasurable move toward. Thus, with the very first incident of life, the entity is required to sense, recognize, analyze, decide and behave. While it may be in simplistic form, it is a huge repertoire of activity for the first life.
This raises a question: Did the first life form disappear immediately and have to be created again and again until it gained this repertoire, of did the very first appearance of life already have this repertoire? If the first life form had this entire repertoire, was it conscious?
The first rule of life is survival. In order to do so, it must metabolize (eat/take in energy and eliminate waste) and reproduce. The environment in which it resides may or may not supply food, but even if it does, the entity must determine what it can and cannot eat. This would seem to be a ‘hit or miss’ process, so it raises the question of how life survived since it cannot yet reproduce. OR is life first generated with a reproductive behavior built in – increasing the first level repertoire? It also appears that the entity would begin to build memory, as it needs to remember what it can eat and where to find it.
It appears that we can take one of two positions – either life was begun over and over again until it finally held on – OR it was preprogrammed to take certain processes on. Since all evidence to date is that life was created only once, it is unlikely that it began in an iterative process. How it might have dealt with these issues, I will leave to the biologists and evolutionists, but it is certainly something that I had not foreseen.
Since eating is a priority for life, we will assume that the senses of taste and smell were the next development. Taste primarily for the purposes of determining what was good for the entity more than what tasted good, and smell for the potential to locate food.
Sight and hearing are improvement on the other senses and increase dramatically the entity’s ability to survive in its environment.
So now we have an entity that has all of the senses reporting in and the entity can interpret the combined results of these sensations and come to a decision about how to act. Much of this process has to do with cognition (thoughts, quirks) and one would assume, I think, that the entity also has a brain and the beginning, at least, of a mind. At this level, I would suggest the predominant brain context is at the level of the doer. Is this entity conscious?
The question of the Mind’s I [acknowledgement to Hofstadter] is one that I would like to address in the following manner. The mind first forms thoughts about what to do – there is a threat, do I fight or flee? Behavior almost precedes the thought. There is a sense of survival, but who is surviving? Me – the doer. But there is an increasing necessity to review the behavior and to queue the order of behaviors and this leads to the observer. I observe Me – and I use these observations to create a schema concerning me and my relationship to others and to predict future behavior and outcomes. So, the mind contains both the primitive Me the Doer and I the Observer and it is this level of performance (self-reflection) that most consider to be ‘conscious’.
We have already outlined three broad levels of consciousness:
Life is conscious of itself and its environment at the very onset. It senses and responds. It therefore makes decisions (judgements) and therefore has some primitive elements of cognition. It also has “feelings” in the true sensory sense of the word. Common language tends to use the terms feelings, affect and emotion as synonyms – yet they represent three distinct experiences. The term feelings corresponds to the primary sensations of touch and is expanded to recognize the “feeling” of sensations of all the other senses. Since the single cell life form has sensations, they have feelings. This is very different from ‘emotions’, which are not biological, but biographical. Emotions are derived from the values placed on sensations, or experiences. If an entity has an experience that is painful and it associates pain with similar experiences, it may conclude that the experience is dangerous and respond with the emotion of fear. Finally, the affects are biological responses that are considered instinctual – e.g., fear of loud noises. Since these would take time to become permanent in the DNA, we will assume they have not yet developed.
Single cell life forms probably do not ‘think’ deeply enough to experience fear. But it raises the question of when fear arises in life forms. In between feelings (sensations) and emotions (values) is affect. Affect refers to the biological (instinctual) responses to experiences such as startle. When the entity is startled, it instinctually stops everything that it is doing and focuses. Affect is neither the stimulus itself nor our appraisal of it, but a report about that stimulus based on the way it is received by the neural apparatus. We use the term ‘affect’ to represent any of the nine [09] types of physiological mechanisms that underlie all emotion. The combination of an affect with our memory of previous experiences of that affect is given the formal name of an ‘emotion’
While this is not the place to delineate everything about affect, some description may be necessary since it is less well known than feelings and emotions. There are six [06] innate affect mechanisms that are triggered by nothing more than the densities and gradients of neural stimulation. These six include: surprise-startle, fear-terror, interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, distress-anguish, and anger-rage affect. There are three [03] other innate mechanisms that have evolved from other sources but have become incorporated into the affect system: dissmell, disgust, and the shame affect.
It is only after an affect has been triggered that the entity is motivated to pay attention to whatever triggered it. The life form, if capable, then proceeds to interpret this experience in light of the memory of prior experiences.
It may be that a clear way to identify levels of consciousness would be to assign each of the three experiences to the three broad levels we have already suggested. Early life forms experience ‘feelings’ (sensations) but no affect or emotions.
The next level of life forms experience ‘feelings’ (sensations) and the innate affects (at least the first six), but do not experience emotions.
While the third group experience all three. Each group therefore experiences a different level of consciousness. It has been suggested that human beings are organized with three [03] primary systems for the management of nonverbal information: the pain system, the drive system, and the affect system. We have accounted for the affect system, but how about the other two? It would seem that both lower levels would be wired for the drive for food and therefore open to all drives. And the middle level would clearly (at least to my imagination) experience pain. But I am not sure about the lowest level. While the pain system is considered the most primitive, it requires special receptors.
“What we experience as pain is not tissue damage as such, but a report about that damage made by specialized pain receptors within but unrelated to the actual tissue that has been injured and which therefore transmits the sensation of pain as an analogue of whatever injury has occurred.”
This would imply the necessity of evolution, which requires time. So the question of pain remains for me unanswered for the earliest life forms.
We are left with three broad-based life forms that are not delineated by any examples yet it seems instinctual that an amoeba, a dog and human being would serve the general purpose. Now the question becomes do these represent different levels of consciousness or is consciousness a term that is only applied to the human example?
And at what point is the advent of Mind? While I am content to accept mind as the product of brain, I am open to the reverse. The packet of information that is necessary for first life might constitute Mind. This would imply that Mind is a product of the universe – and is consciousness necessarily a quality of Mind?
Mind, at least in human beings, is the programmer of the brain. While certain genes and neural networks are clearly available to the healthy fetus, what happens afterwards is quite interesting.
“There is good evidence that we can gain a degree of conscious control over virtually any population of neurons, provided that we receive immediate conscious feedback from the neural activity.” Bernard J. Baars – 1988
While the concept of brain plasticity has been scientifically demonstrated for years, the field of epigenetics is showing that who you are is the product of your interpretation of the things that happen to you in your life, which changes the way your genes operate. Genes are actually switched on or off depending on your interpretation of life experiences, and your genes and lifestyle form a feedback loop. Thus what you think is critical to which genes or neural networks operate and whether they are able to help or harm your ability to function in the real world.
Michael M. Merzenich has helped to identify two distinct periods of brain plasticity: The Infant Critical Period and the period of Adult Plasticity. The Infant Critical Period is when a child’s brain establishes neural processes for the stimuli to which it is presented. The Adult Plasticity period is when the brain refines its neural processes as it masters a variety of tasks.
Beyond the initial operation components from lower levels of life, the infant makes decisions about experiences, which develop the neural networks that the brain uses to think, feel and emote. The concept or thought of making lemons into lemonade conveys a productive life attitude. Even damaged to the body and brain can be helped to regenerate as long as we can identify immediate cognitive feedback. As an example, Paul Bach-y-Rita, an American neuroscientist whose most notable work was the first applications of sensory substitution he created was a chair that allowed blind people to ‘see’. He did this by rerouting the sensor optical input to the nerve system on the individual’s back – and because this system was close to and related to the optical nerve system, it was able to send the optical sensory input to the proper place. (See In Progress 3)
So we have a situation where the third level of life is able to psychologically and physically regenerate itself providing it is able to have immediate conscious feedback. I would interpret this as immediate awareness of feedback, since we don’t yet know what consciousness is.
Jerome R. Gardner – 2018