Consciousness

I've been thinking a lot about Peter Watt's Blindsight since I last posted here. (See date.) The novel's issues I described before still remain. But the more I think about it, the more I think that the novel itself is a refutation to what I think is the novel's conclusion.

The conclusion of Blindsight, both my interpretation and the author's description in the afterword, is that consciousness is a burden on what could be a much more optimal system. Intelligent organisms without consciousness are more efficient and outcompete conscious organisms.

I don't attempt to refute the burden of consciousness nor do I claim that conscious organisms are faster, better or more intelligent in their niche than unconscious organisms. Cephalopods are intelligent and exploit their niche brilliantly. I'll venture a guess that they are not conscious. I suspect that "consciousness", they way we would define the term, is likely a product of social selection. Consciousness, as defined by Koch, is the ability to examine our own motivations.

Examining motivations of any sort don’t seem to have any viable Darwinian use outside a social context-- what's the point of figuring out the motivation of a female or a predator? She wants to pass on her genes and the predator wants to eat you. Who needs to figure out the motivation?

But in a social setting, where reproduction and feeding depend on rank and understanding, determining the motivation and needs of your competitors and those above and below you have significant advantages. When you get good enough at this, examining your own motivations and urges become possible. Whether or not self-examination is a selective advantage remains to be seen but it's not even possible until you can figure it out for others. Hence, my suspicion that cephalopods probably are not conscious-- not being social animals, they don't need to be.

In Blindsight, there are some very neat aliens that are intelligent without being conscious. They determine humans, cluttering up the radiosphere with social noise, must be dealt with. I'm not entirely sure I disagree with their assessment. After all, if I were being bombarded by Gilligan's Island reruns I might feel the same.

But these aren't just unconscious, intelligent animals. These are unconscious, intelligent, spacefaring beings. That requires understanding, planning, cooperative use of resources and denial of immediate advantage for long term gain. Why would anyone go into space for the first time? What the heck is out there to attract an intelligent being? Vacuum. Lots and lots of vacuum.

I'm coming to the conclusion that consciousness is not about intelligence. These are two orthogonal qualities. Intelligence is about determining optimum paths to a goal and consciousness is about setting the goal. Or, as Larry Niven said in Protector, intelligence is a tool and tools may not be used intelligently.

To restate this a little bit: Consciousness is about determining a set of possible choices. Intelligence is about choosing the right one.

Let's look at space again. I think there are a lot of reasons to go into space. Knowledge. Exploration. Dispersing humanity so we might actually survive somewhere if it all goes to crap. But none of these are intelligent motives. The aforesaid aliens already have understanding, planning, cooperative use of resources and denial of immediate advantage for long term gain-- they needed that to get into space to begin with. If they have all of that, then fixing up the planet is much less expensive and gets a much better return on investment. Why should they go into space?

But consciousness isn't about rationality or intelligence. Consciousness is about increasing the possibilities beyond what rationality or intelligence have to offer. It's about multiple motivations behind the same act. We don't just colonize Mexico because the natives have gold. We colonize them because we want to save their souls as well. You can't value gold or save souls without consciousness. Without consciousness, gold is a metal with nice conductive features and soul just aren't on the table.

Which brings us back to Blindsight. In Blindsight, the crew, with the possible exception of the ship itself and its vampire captain, are all conscious human beings. All of the possibilities (with the final exception of the unconscious aliens) are discovered by virtue of conscious understanding. That these possibilities fail is not an indictment of their pursuit. Consciousness has blind spots just like anything else. But the possibilities brought up are not ones that could have been conceived unconsciously. Hence, the book up to but not including its final conclusion is in fact a refutation of its underlying premise.

What is Steven Reading?

I finished the first draft of my novel in July in order to print it out and drop it off in the workshop. A novel takes a while to workshop. This left me with not much writing to do until the novel was workshopped in October.

I don't mark out spoilers when I talk about works so if you're sensitive to that, better stop now.

So, I read Peter Watts' four novels: Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth-- collectively known as the Starfish novels. Then, Blindsight. It was pretty cool. I dropped them down on my pda as PDF files and read them whenever I had a chance. The PDF translater you can get from Adobe worked fairly well but every now and then had a glitch: paging forward actually paged back a few pages, occasional formatting issues. You can get the novels as PDFs here.

Watts is a very good writer in many ways. His SF tech is good, though baroque. You admire it's incredible coolness at the same time you're wondering if any business would ever actually invest that much. He plays in an interesting sandbox: damaged people in the workaday world are actually very functional in specific environments.

The Starfish books are a beginning, middle and end to a story of human beings (and all other recognizable terrestrial life forms) versus an earlier also-ran form of life that gets released on the world. It's an interesting premise though he has to do a fair amount of dancing to make it plausible. He has the organism living in eukaryotic cells but then isolates them at an undersea vent. The only reason they don't spread around is that they're isolated at the vent. The only flaw here is the vents themselves are geologically ephemeral. While the Juan de Fuca vents have been around a while, they weren't around back in the days of Pangaea. Still, I've seen much worse dances than that. On a scale of 10, 10 being, say Mark Twain's Huck Finn or John Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer, it gets a respectable 5. Not a towering work of literature but way above Judith Krantz.

Blindsight is in some ways both more and less interesting. The characters are better realized, the task is very clear (investigate an menacing alien intelligence), the reason they might used damaged people much better supported. However, beneath the whole book is an investigation into the nature of consciousness that I think is only marginally supported. The resulting premise is that consciousness is expensive and is an accidental fluke without much actual utility. It's slow. It costs a lot. What good is it anyway? The world is finally taken over by vampires who are much more intelligent but not conscious.

The first issue I had with this part of the book was the treatment of consciousness. Essentially, the implicit assumption was that consciousness was something that humans do. Other animals didn't do it and were therefore not conscious. This was the first road block for me. More and more we're finding what we most value in humans, whether it's language, tool use or empathy, are not the solely practiced by humans. It seems absurd to me that we can expect "consciousness" to be somehow unique to humans.

Among scientists studying primates there is something called the "mirror test". You take a monkey, paint a spot on its face where it can't see. Then you put a mirror next to the cage. If the monkey checks out the spot on its own face then it's made the connection between mirror image and self and is therefore "self-aware".

This test is interesting in primates that are closely related to man but what it really tests is visual self image recognition, something that humans find important. Would it mean the same to wolf? Not unless you presented that image in scent. An elephant? An armadillo? My point is that this test has built into it a concept of "I'm conscious. That's something I'd do. Therefore if the animal does it, it's like me. And therefore conscious. QED." Propose it as a logic diagram and any first year logic student would flag it erroneous.

My own feeling is that everything single thing about human beings, brains, feet, blood, liver, shares an enormous common ground with other birds, be they fish, fowl, frog or Frezian. It's silly that consciousness doesn't have its roots in our biology and is therefore subject to Darwinian selection.

However, even if I don't like the sandbox, Watts builds some pretty interesting castles. His discussion of vampires (see the presentation) is very interesting. Gets my Best Rubber Science Award for Q3 of 2007.

After that, I went back to my roots and re-read Vubre the Great. This novel in progress is written by Jon Burrowes, a friend of mine. It came out of the Future Boston project in my workshop, CSFW. There's a description of the project on the site so I won't go into it here. You can't describe Vubre. It's a wild ride. It's a hard read since it was never truly brought to the level of publication but I think it's worth the effort.

That's it for now.

stevep