How does consciousness work?
There's always been a debate about how consciousness works because we all have an impression that we exist inside of our brain and this idea that the self is somehow separate from the organ inside the skull gives rise to notions like souls. For science, trying to explain how we get that impression has been difficult because we are observing the observer that happens to be us...
There's clearly a lot of self-referencing going on as we are conscious of our own thoughts and that makes it difficult to analyse what's happening.
But there has been a lot of progress in neuroscience over recent decades and one book particularly has explained a great deal about our understanding of consciousness, how it arises, and our perception of self. Douglas Hofstadter has written a book called I Am A Strange Loop which offers a materialist explanation of consciousness based on science but being Hofstadter, he also draws inspiration from mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and even photography. His argument goes as follows.
Human brains have developed under evolutionary pressure, the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. Instead of always referring to the simplest of objects, we are able to use more general (abstract) ideas such as village, food, tools, harvest, season, etc. This abstraction enables us to manipulate and control the natural world and gives us an evolutionary advantage.
We relate these abstract conceptions together in patterns of symbols, adding new concepts to the network to integrate the new knowledge obtained through our experiences. Now all this seems to be evidenced in all sentient animals although the level of symbolism is variable. Hofstadter wonders about the symbolic structures available to a mosquito - presumably not very sophisticated. However, for people, these symbolic structures represented in distributed form in the brain acquire a property which is quite remarkable - they become self-referential, they become aware of themselves.
Now for the difficult bit, for which Hofstadter uses the ideas of an Austrian mathematician by the name of Kurt Gödel. He was interested in the attempt by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, to represent all of the axioms of mathematics symbolically. Russell and Whitehead hoped to prove that if you could represent a mathematical theorem using a logically consistent symbolic notation, then it would be possible to prove whether or not the theorem was correct. If they could do that, then any properly formulated mathematical statements would be provable - and therefore all of mathematics would be shown to be logically consistent. Cheers all round, Nobel Prize, nice holiday, etc... Unfortunately, Gödel tipped it on it's head.
He found a way to represent self-referential statements inside any consistent symbolic notation which meant unprovable statements could be accurately made, so mathematics could never be totally provable. Cancel the bubbly!
What's that got to do with consciousness? Well, our system of linked symbols in the brain will stay reactive unless they can become self-referential and that's what's happened in the mammalian brain. Hofstadter argues that as the brain develops, it is able to maintain self-referential loops of symbolic structures which provides us with self-awareness. It's that self-reference that gives rise to our perception that we are inside our brains. It also gives us the idea that we are in control.
Our consciousness is simply a property of the human brain and a bi-product is the notion of self. But the really important part is that because it is self-referential, it is not a closed system - the symbolic structures can influence the way those structures themselves develop. It's the basis of a learning system, developing more sophisticated symbolic structures to improve the manipulation of other symbolic structures, ultimately improving our ability to manipulate the real world.
Philosophers have argued about the mind/brain problem for centuries - is there something called mind independent of the brain? Since we feel ourselves perceiving things, it's easy to accept the idea of this other presence, and that's why many people believe there is a soul. Hofstadter shows how unnecessary this idea really is. Our perception of ourselves is easily explained by the self-referential symbolic structures in our brain.
But as neuroscience increases our understanding of how these symbolic structures are manipulated in the brain, and as we generate computer systems with a similar capability, we may see our understanding of consciousness radically changed. The transition from inert, to barely conscious, to human-level consciousness, or beyond, may simply be a question of the control of self-referential symbolic loops.
That challenges the very persistent belief that humans are special in their form of sentience. Already we have computer systems that can reason symbolically and there's no reason that they can't become self-referential. If Hofstadter is right, artificial consciousness is just as likely as artificial intelligence and we've been using the latter for several decades.
Just by way of a bonus, the advent of artificial consciousness should send the right-wing religious neocons into an ethical tailspin as we get legal calls for the rights afforded to embryos to be extended to computer systems that have developed the ability to express feelings. Now that would be a debate worth watching...
