Thoughts> Nonzero - cooperative evolution

An essay on assigning meaning to the evolution of consciousness (don't worry, more holiday photos coming up in the next post soon).

Abstract: The only quality separating humans from animals is our ability to craft elaborate excuses for our instincts.

On the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I finished reading Richard Wright's Nonzero (thanks for the recommendation, Jon). It took me a while to get through it, and despite the author's ultimate conclusions, it's a very good pop-science book on the evolution of culture, cooperation in culture and genetics and the (potential) directionality of evolution. Here's what I thought, written on the Shinkansen train.

During the book, Wright carefully tiptoes the line between the Intelligent Design camp and the hard-core-scientific evolutionary camp. In the end, he states that evolution exhibits evidence of teleology - being designed for a purpose, or more robustly, exhibiting persistent, flexible directionality via information processing. But from the evidence he presents, and the little this armchair anthropologist has gathered this far, I claim that Wright misreads the evidence and that there is no mystery of consciousness.

Consciousness is the most important stepping stone in making any claims for or against a teleological design, but for Wright this is a tripping stone. He juxtaposes consciousness - subjective experience of the world and of existing in the world - with evolutionary needs on the basis that subjective experience, interpreted through modern science and behavioural theory is superfluous, an epiphenomenon: unnecessary.

Granted, the existence of consciousness is a tough nut. Intelligence, in general, is a positive thing for evolution of a species - fast, more complex information processing and communication of this information has been the ticket of our species, and is employed by many other successful species as well. Depending on definitions, you can claim that these properties correlate positively with the success of a species.

But what about consciousness? In setting the stage for claiming that consciousness can be ascribed as having almost mystical properties, Wright argues that it isn't necessary - we don't need to be self-aware, to be able to assign qualities to our own existence in order to evolve successfully. As long as we care for our offspring as efficiently as we can, we don't have to feel love for our offspring. Evolution doesn't call for it. In essence, he bases the appreciation of consciousness on the question "Why is it like something to be alive?", the sub-question "What is being alive like?" being answerable with adjectives and adverbs. Or as a little thought experiment, contrast "Why do we feel love?" with "Why are we able to doubt the love we feel?"

But in my subjective experience: subjective experience - self-awareness and the subscription to definitions of being alive - is perfectly in line with evolution. From reacting to a simple set of stimuli (threat, hunger, cold), we've over time grown to having to react to an increasingly complex set of stimuli, and the organism has started to prioritize both between stimuli and between reactions to different stimuli.

From the gene's perspective, sorting out the best prioritizations (not just the best reactions) has grown more complex as well. So we start to create mental taxanomies of our reactions. This is still far from subjective experience, and is merely algorithmic. But we are a social species, and the evolution of the species goes hand in hand with the evolution of society (it's just that societal evolution of a species doesn't really mushroom until communication skills evolve). As complexity grows (and our processing of sensory information feeds into this growth), we start to react to expectations of our reactions to stimuli. This means we need to plan our place into the future, and we prioritize this placement of ourselves. Feelings, urges, are the most efficient way of processing this. Fear and greed, the muscles in the arm moving the Invisible Hand, allow us to 'feel' our anticipated place after a series of reactions to an array of stimuli and in order for this to happen, we need to be aware of ourselves in relation to others. Self-awareness wouldn't evolve in a species that favors solitary existence.

Intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness are over-simplifications, they are just shorthand. They are not emergent properties of a supercharged brain, a brain that during it's evolution passes a point where it 'tips' into intelligence and self-awareness. It's not black and white. There are various stages in evolution of subjective experience as there are of consciousness - and not even stages, but a constant slope, or curve, or flatline - and we, as a species, are at a point where prioritization of our behaviour includes the prioritization of our own experience of the world. Subjective experience has a function and is thus a natural product of evolution. There is nothing mystical or metaphysical to it.

Just because we can play with the abstract concept of intelligence doesn't mean we're intelligent. And just because we are aware of our selves, of our experience in existence, doesn't mean we've somehow 'arrived' at a some peak of awareness, or even a waypoint, of evolution (Wright doesn't imply this either). A species, quite likely ours, will develop into being more intelligent and more self-aware: after all, our species, being highly social and having some genetics wired for social interaction and cooperation has jump-started collective self-awareness by being able to engage in (very) abstract communication (such as this essay).