Meditation One: The Origins of Consciousness

Meditations On The Nature Of Mind

Meditation One: The Origins of Consciousness

By E. Hoffmann

Every age is subject to fallacies caused by the prejudices of the age; our present age being no exception. As with other ages the prejudices of our age not only go unnoticed, they are often rewarded with academic hoers. The fallacy we are concerned with herein is that of strong Artificial Intelligence Theory, and it is a theory that must be put to rest before progress can be made on the nature of mind. This idea of the brain being a digital computer is a very strange form of occasionalism. In western philosophy the theory of occasionalism reached it’s greatest influence in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The theory of occasionalism holds that all actions of an agent are due to the will of the creator. This is, of course, how a computer works; it can only do what it’s program has been designed to do by it’s creator, or in a computers case, the programmer. Like most fallacies this one works because a vital element has been left out. In the case of A.I. theory the element that is missing is the appetition of the agent. Agents pursue actions and activities    motivated by their own desires, needs and appetites. Until a computer has it’s own appetites and desires it shall never be conscious. To put it simply; a computer has no use for a mind. The A.I. theorist would have been closer to the truth if they had called this theory ‘Simulated Instinct’: simulated because even agents that rely more on instinct are still motivated by their own appetition.

Instinct and intellect are both part of the same continuum; a continuum that consciousness is only further growth. It is to instinct that we must turn to first. Instinct in it’s purest form is to be observed in plants; it must be remembered that there is slumbering intellect in instinct, and hidden instinct in even the most abstract intellect. The best example of instinct can be found in the vegetable kingdom; think of a tree that drops it’s leaves when the temperature drops. This is how instinct works; some aspect or relation of experience triggers a reaction from the agent. To use an example that is closer to everyones experience: when a person reaches a certain age, sexual desires arise. Now we can understand why A.I. Theorists should have called their theory ‘Simulated Instinct’ instead of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. As was said before, their theory shall always remain a simulation, because computers only do the will of their programmer instead of serving their own needs. The trigger reaction of a plant serves the needs of the plant not some outside agent that has created or programmed the plant.

To turn to intellect is to highlight the differences between plants and animals. As we said earlier, instinct and intellect are a continuum that consciousness grows out of. The most visible difference between plants and animals is that animals are mobil while, plants are stationary. This is due to the different method of alimentation of plants and animals. Plants can accept nutrients directly from the environment, while animals must have nutrients fixed in an organic compound. The power of intellect is the recognition of experience, the ability for the agent to find what it needs. To help us illustrate this point let us look at an example of an agent that is low on the scale of intellect; thus being easy to understand. We shall call this example “what it is like to be a tiger-shark”. First we must deal with some objections that can be put forward. And while dealing with these objections we can also make progress in understanding the nature of intellect.

The objections could be raised that sharks live in water while we live on land and that sharks also have a sense-organ that we do not poses, so how could we possibly know what it is like to be a tiger-shark. The answer is easy and obvious: a tiger-shark has not reached the level of abstract thought or self reflection; thus there is no language, poetry or art for us to try to understand. The difference in the medium and the extra-sense organ are of no importance and make no difference in understanding a tiger-shark. All that happens in the intellect of a tiger-shark is feeling and emotion; this is one example male readers shall have an easier time understanding than female readers. All that male readers have to do is think back to the times of their late teens when they wanted to have sex with every nubile woman who entered their field of perception. With this thought experiment it should start to become clear of how it feels to be a tiger-shark; instead of wanting to have sex with every nubile woman the tiger shark wants to eat every object that enters it’s field of perception. To attempt to satisfy it’s hunger, the tiger-shark must use it’s senses. It first uses the senses that work at a distance to identify potential food; this is about as close to prognosticating that a tiger-shark comes close to. Then it gives pursuit and at-last bites into the potential food. The sense of taste being the last test of the potential food; the determining test to confirm the prognostication of the other senses. The training of the tiger-shark only consists of trail and error; it is doubtful that there is much, in the way of, communication between tiger sharks. To recap: the tiger-shark feels hungry, this motivates it’s search for potential food. It then determines whether or not the potential food is food. We have learned that the intellect is the function that enables the agent to find the objects that satisfy it’s appetites. That thought starts out as feeling and emotion, and these senses must be coordinated. Now we can observe the function of intellect; it is to coordinate experience, isolate aspects of experience that are important to the agent and then to turn the isolated aspects of experience back into instinct.

This is an assertion that demands further explanation: we must think back to the operation of instinct. Instinct takes an aspect of experience to use as a trigger for action and intellect is when the agent recognizes experience and turns aspects of experience into triggers for action. We of course know this as the creation of habit and memory; habit and memory is when a recognized aspect of experience is turned into a trigger for action. Therefor, the agent endowed with intellect, because of it’s flexibility, can accomplish, in an incredibly short time, what would take generations of education for an agent that operates on instinct alone to accomplish. That an agent can pick out aspects of experience to use as triggers for action is uncontroversial; this is how animals are trained. A trained animal performs the actions desired by the trainer because when the trainer gives the command (trigger word) the animal knows, in performing the action, some of it’s desires shall be satisfied. The more highly developed the animals intellect the faster it can turn aspects of experience into triggers for action; we call this learning. We could also call it ‘turning intellect into instinct’. In humans, intellect is more developed than any other animal. And this development is what has led to what moderns call consciousness and past generations called imagination: the ability to manipulate and communicate abstract ideas.

Now we can observe how abstract ideas are generated. We have laid the foundations with the above discussion of instinct and intellect. In humans, intellect is more developed than in any other animal; we learn faster than any other animal. The next step was taken by humans; remember, a trained dog knows what actions to take when a trigger word is given. Humans can not only identify a sound with an action they can divorce the word from the action while keeping it’s identity. This is the essential step toward consciousness; to keep the identification without performing the action. At this point the trigger word can be used for communication, and here we have the origins of consciousness and imagination.

Before concluding, a few more remarks need to be made on the method of  abstraction. As we remember from the example of the tiger-shark, intellect is the recognition of experience to pick out aspects the agent is interested in. In the case of the tiger-shark, all this includes is picking out edible fish from everything else. Even in this example we observe the method of abstraction; it is to cut out an aspect of experience, and to do this you sacrifice content for clarity. And as you go further up the scale of abstraction the method remains the same; the more clarity the less content. The best example I would like to use is one of mathematics where for almost perfect clarity we have given up almost all content.

In the second part of this essay we shall take up how abstraction creates minds.

End of Part One.