evolution of consciousness: a new comment (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 08, 2022, 21:38 (989 days ago) @ David Turell

A book review:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00652-z?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_c...

"A tour of the evolution of minds
"An informative guide takes in archaea, birds, primates and more — overconfidently.

"Look through a microscope at a macrophage cell pursuing, engulfing and consuming a bacterium, and it is hard not to impose a narrative: one is trying to catch the other, which is in turn trying to escape. In Journey of the Mind, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam imply that this interpretation is not fanciful. They argue that minds of a sort have existed since the first archaea colonized the planet, billions of years ago.

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"The narrative is enjoyable and illuminating, but it is flawed by a failure to separate fact from speculation. (my bold)

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"Ogas and Gaddam take a very broad view of mind as “a physical system that converts sensations into action”. At face value, this grants a mind to thermostats and robots as much as to living entities. “A mind responds. A mind transforms. A mind acts,” they write. But the same is true of many machines. What, then, distinguishes a mind? If it’s sentience or awareness, the authors give a confusing picture. They say the “self-awareness” of an amoeba is “piddling” — and later seem to deny this quality to all organisms except vertebrates. (my bold)

"Many assertions go beyond the facts. The discussion of consciousness rests on the belief that the problem has been solved by cognitive scientist Stephen Grossberg (whom the authors thank for “guidance and support”). Since the late 1960s, Grossberg has developed the idea that consciousness arises from ‘resonance’ between specific modules of the brain. Ogas and Gaddam are vague about what resonance means here, beyond saying that the modules amplify and prolong each other’s outputs, and they give the reader little indication of what empirical evidence exists to support the idea. Grossberg’s theory is provocative and stimulating, but, couched in the abstract mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory, it remains contingent on his supposition that “all conscious states are resonant states”. I’m not convinced it amounts to the revolution that the authors assert.

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"Ogas and Gaddam jump the gun, in my view, when they suggest that Grossberg has all the answers.

"There are other instances in which they present contentious ideas with certainty. For all of the minds they discuss, much remains open. They write that birds didn’t develop language “because they don’t have hands”, but in fact it’s still debated whether gestures helped lead to the origin of language. They state that insects have no consciousness, when there is good reason to suppose that bees, at least, have many of the mental attributes associated with consciousness, such as foresight and the ability to imagine. Even bacteria are not the simple automata portrayed here; other researchers describe bacterial behaviours in the language of cognition.

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"There is more than a hint that evolution is striving to a particular end in Ogas and Gaddam’s suggestion that, once early single-celled organisms acquired the ability to sense and move, “the royal road to consciousness beckoned”.

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"There is plenty to like in Journey of the Mind. It is so often informative and entertaining that it feels mean to cavil. But the book exemplifies a persistent problem in popular science, in which pet theories are presented with too much confidence and too little context. Readers deserve the full picture — less definitive and satisfying, perhaps, but ultimately more honest and illuminating." (my bold)

Comment: the reviewer's don't surprise me. Seeing something that seems to act intelligently doesn't mean it is intrinsically intelligent in and of itself. It may dimply be following instructions it has been given. Thermostats and robots are just that, looking as if they take intelligent actions and we understand how they do it by following built-in designed algorithms. So can cells and simple one-celled animals. To assume actual intelligence exists is a very thin analysis.