Re: Evolution of consciousness

On 07/05/2024 08:28, Arkalen wrote:

On 06/05/2024 16:45, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 5/3/24 11:21 AM, Arkalen wrote:

On 02/05/2024 19:03, Mark Isaak wrote:

On 5/2/24 6:21 AM, Arkalen wrote:

On 30/04/2024 01:36, Mark Isaak wrote:

My views on the evolution of consciousness are starting to gel.
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1. Rudimentary nervous systems evolve.
2. Brains evolve, capable of memory and of decisions other than reflex.
3. Those decisions probably work better if the brain has a model of the world to work with. So such a model evolves.
4. Some creatures live socially. Their brains need a model of that important aspect of the world: the fellow beings one lives with, including how they think.
5. So we've now got a model of minds. How about if we apply it to *our own mind*? That might make our thinking about interactions with others' minds more efficient.
6. Viola! Consciousness!
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Does that make sense to people?  Is it time for me to write a book on the subject? (Do you think publishers will want the book to be more than 106 words long?)
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There's also the problem of testing it. I'm open to suggestions there, too. Step 4 implies that the model of how we think need not agree with how we think, much as the mental model of our world is flat, not spherical. This has at least some confirmation (e.g., blindness to many biases). More would be better.

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Have you seen my thread on Michael Tomasello's "The Evolution of Agency"? I think the book would interest you. If you want more detail I have a post somewhere in that thread summarizing its arguments, I'd be happy to hear your take.

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I have seen it, but I don't remember particular points.
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I just came across reference to another book by Michael S.S. Graziano, _Consciousness and the Social Brain_, which appears to make an argument similar to mine above (particularly steps 4 and 5).
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Basically (if you don't mind me going on about it again) he proposes a scheme similar to what you did but more specific, fleshed-out and (IMO) convincing. It revolves around the notion of "agents" or "agency" which Tomasello defines as a system that achieves goals via a feedback-control mechanisms where the system perceives aspects of the environment, compares them to the desired goal, engages in behaviors meant to bring it closer to the goal, checks the environment again, and loops this way until the goal is achieved.
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His parallels to your steps might be:
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1) rudimentary nervous systems evolve that coordinate perception with behavior on a stimulus-response basis but not the feedback-control system involved in true agency.
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2) brains evolve that do implement such a feedback-control system [I'm not sure in the book he explicitly associates it with brains, but he does associate it with vertebrates which do have distinct brains as a feature so I'll say it's close enough for a paraphrase]
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He doesn't have a parallel to your step "3" because models of the world are implicit in all of the cognitive models he presents, in fact the differences in he calls "experiential niches" (which could be thought of as "world models") are pretty important. So for example he points out that with agency comes the mechanism of *attention* (i.e. you orient your perceptions in specific ways depending on what goals you're working towards and where you're currently at in working towards them) which implies experiences of an outside world and internal states that are or aren't in sync, full of things that are relevant/irrelevant, good/bad etc.
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4) He does bring in social living as a possible cause of his next step in the evolution of agency that he sets at early mammals: the appearance of a feedback-control system applied on top of the previous one to monitor and control the goal-seeking process itself (he sees social living as a driver for this because of the competition between peers would induce a benefit in more flexible, efficient decision-making). These early mammals would be able to not only perceive the world, pick a behavior to fulfill a goal and shut everything down in case of danger (as he describes lizards doing), but mentally play out possible behaviors and flexibly inhibit some in favor of others depending on which they anticipate working out best. This would introduce into the "world model" or "experiential niche" notions of goals, behaviors and cause-and-effect relationships between the two. I don't think he introduces models of other *minds* at this step per se although it's a bit like world models - they're implicit in several steps it's more of a question of what aspect of minds is being modelled.
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5) I do think there is still some similarity between your 5 and the next level of agency Tomasello suggests, although he sets it at great apes and you seem to set it at humans (then again many would argue great apes are conscious and I don't think Tomasello would disagree). He proposes an extra metacognitive feedback-control system monitoring the lower ones allowing control not only over the behaviors taken in service of a goal but of the goals themselves, and an understanding of cause-and-effect in general and not only as concerns one's own actions. It also induces an understanding of others as being agents with goals they behave in service of.
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6) While he does think of 5 as the ability to reason and I'm pretty sure would call it "consciousness" he does have 2 other steps separating humans from that, which involve collective agency. He proposes the critical difference between humans and other great apes is the ability to coordinate as part of a group that itself fits the criteria for being an agent - with collective goals, the ability to monitor their completion and act and self-regulate in service of them. He sees this as coming in two parts, first the ability to coordinate pairwise to achieve specific tasks (somewhere in hominid evolution - he gives several examples illustrating how strikingly worse chimpanzees are at basic cooperation than even human children) and then the ability to function as part of a larger community with shared norms that allow coordination with strangers (which he sets early in the evolution of our own species). He talks about this inducing a kind of triple mental model of agency, the "self" agent (the individual's goals, parallel to the sense of agency of other great apes), the "role" agent (the goals implied by one's role in some collective enterprise) and the "collective" agent (the goals of the collective enterprise itself). He then talks about how various aspects of our experience like culture, morality etc follow from that.
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I think it's interesting how this suggests a difference between having a model of one's own mind, having a model of others' minds, and having a model of *mind in general* that's then applied to oneself and others. "Models of the world" and "models of the mind" really collapses a lot of functionality and variability and I think Tomasello's model does a better job of separating out different potential strands and honing in on those that actually account for how we resemble and differ from other species.
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I also like how this model justifies that the last step, and only the last step, is truly self-reflective. All the other steps involve taking a system at a certain level of agency and adding a monitoring/control level, resulting in a system that's aware of itself *as a system of the lower level*. That last step is the only one that involves the system monitoring/controlling a level *above* itself, and indeed being able to monitor/control any arbitrary system of agency at all (given any combination of humans can display collective agency and a human can be part of multiple collective agencies at any given time). Meaning the recursion ends there, it's the only agent model that can model itself as being the level it is.

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Does he give a definition of consciousness? It sounds like he sees the "collective" agent as an essential part of it. I don't doubt that it is essential for humanity's achievements, but I'm not convinced it is necessary for consciousness. I still like my definition of consciousness as having a mental model of one's own mind.
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 The book isn't about consciousness; it's about the evolution of agency and it doesn't conflate agency with consciousness, agency as it defines it is completely different. I think it has very obvious and clarifying implications on the evolution of consciousness but the notion that the "collective agent" is essential to consciousness as we experience it is my extrapolation, not his. I'd guess he's in the "there are many kinds of consciousness" camp and I'd further guess that he thinks of great apes at least as "fully" conscious like us.
  For me it's a bit like I said in another thread recently - when I look at my own consciousness I feel that the self-reflective "this is what happened and here's how I think of it" is a very important part of it, and that an existence that just had the experiences of the moment without the integrating, looking-back part wouldn't be fully conscious even if *in us* it's obviously an integral part of our conscious state. And I wouldn't be surprised if that self-reflective part really does occur only at part 6.
  "Having a mental model of one's own mind" is all well and good but "model" is never 1:1 and plenty of simplified representations we could call "models" obviously don't suffice so it just pushes the question back to "what kind of model?".
  I might have another post giving more detail on what Tomasello says about experiential niches later.
 

In the chapter "Ancient Vertebrates as Goal-Directed Agents" chapter:
"Organisms need to perceive only those aspects of the environment that are relevant for their actions. A thermostat senses only temperature because that is all it needs to perceive to do its job. C. elegans perceives nutritious and noxious chemicals because that is all it needs to perceive to obtain food. A lizard perceives many things because that is what it needs to perceive to direct and control its various effective actions. The organism's action capabilities thus determine its experiential world. (See J. J. Gibson's 1977 argument that an organism's perceptual world comprises 'affordances' for its actions.)"
- page 34
"Along with goal-directed agency, then, comes a fundamental shift in experiential niche. Organisms no longer just perceive attractive and repulsive stimuli; they attend to situations that are relevant for their goal pursuit. Situations that are relevant for their goal pursuit are of
two types: (i) opportunities for goal attainment (e.g., the cricket is low in the bush); or (ii) obstacles to goal attainment (e.g., a snake is close by)."
- pages 36-37
In the chapter "Ancient Mammals as Intentional Agents" chapter:
"This new form of psychological organization leads, once again, not just to new particular experiences but to a new type of experience. Because reptiles begin operating as simple goal-directed agents, they began experiencing the world not just in terms of punctate stimuli but in terms of situations of opportunity and obstacle. Beyond this, operating with an executive psychological tier created for mammals the possibility of experiencing their own perceptual and behavioral functioning. Reptiles and other goal-directed agents do not experience their own perceptions and actions executively, whereas mammals not only experience their own perceptions and actions executively but operate on them from that executive tier. Reptiles and other goal-directed agents are sentient of the outside world; mammals and other intentional agents are conscious of their own actions and perceptions.
Conscious experience thus exists, in my view, only in creatures who operate with an executive tier of functioning, including most mammals and whatever nonmammalian species operate in this way".
- pages 64-65
After referring to Graziano and Piaget's ideas on consciousness:
"In this view, however, it may be that mammals and other intentional agents are not conscious of the more central psychological processes of executive decision-making and cognitive control (i.e., beyond a global feeling of uncertainty in considering a decision); they are doing these things, but are not conscious that they are doing them. This is an interesting possibility, because, as I speculate further in the next chapter, being conscious of their own executive decision-making and cognitive control - from a second-order executive (reflective) tier - is precisely what great apes, as rational agents, begin to do."
- pages 65-66
Concluding the chapter:
"But for now, the essential points are that (i) basic sentience in the sense of attention to, and experience of, the outside world is for agents a psychological primitive; and (ii) basic consciousness involves the organism attending to its own goals, actions, and experience from its executive tier of functioning. My hypothesis is that mammals and other intentional agents are conscious in this sense."
- page 66
It's harder to get a representative excerpt of his view of consciousness of great apes in the next chapter "Ancient Apes as Rational Agents" because he mostly goes over their specific abilities & experimental evidence thereof, but if we figure he thinks consciousness is a mammalian trait it might explain he didn't feel the need to expand on that aspect.
"In this case, the change in agentive organization characteristic of great apes - the emergence of a second-order tier of executive decision-making and control - led to the formation of an experiential niche structured by the causes underlying physical events and the intentions underlying agentive action, both organized into similar logical-inferential paradigms, enabling individuals to imagine causally and intentionally structured states of the world that are not directly perceived."
- page 88
Finally, the chapter "Ancient Humans as Socially Normative Agents":
"Cognitively, to mentally coordinate with a collaborative partner, including via cooperative communication, early humans evolved to cognitively represent the world perspectivally: the exact same object or event may be construed as something different depending on the perspective one chooses to take. For example, this stick on the ground might be seen as a potential spear for us to use in our antelope hunt (if we need a weapon), or it might be seen as something that could make noise if stepped on (if we are worried about that), depending on our common-ground understanding of what is relevant to the situation at hand. Since the process of mental coordination in cooperative communication required individuals to take the perspective of others on their own perspective recursively - he *intents* for me to *attend* to that as a potential weapon - early humans came to cognitively represent the world both perspectivally and recursively (...). Great apes have not evolved recursively perspectival representations because they have not evolved to mentally coordinate with others in joint agencies".
- page 103
"As I have argued at other steps in my story, new agentive organization creates for individuals a new experiential niche. Reptiles come to experience situations of obstacle and opportunity; mammals come to consciously experience their own operational level of functioning; and great apes come to experience their own executive decision-making and cognitive control from a reflective tier of operation, which serves as the basis for apes' understanding of causal and intentional relations in their physical and social worlds. Early humans came to live in a social/cooperative experiential niche, structured by the shared worlds and recursive perspectives created by collaboration, joint attention, and common ground, and motivated by the partners' sense of respect and responsibility towards one another. Shared worlds experienced via recursive perspectives among mutually respectful and responsible cooperative agents: this is the new experiential niche inhabited by early humans."
- pages 104-105
Then, after discussing the extra level of social norms:
"As a species of great ape, modern humans perceived and understood their physical and social worlds in terms of underlying causal and intentional forces. As descendants of earlier humans, modern humans perceived and understood reality in terms of different possible perspectives on it, and also in terms of newly normative social attitudes, like responsibilities, that bound individuals to their collaborative partners. But as they evolved into fully cultural beings, modern humans came to perceive and understand the world not just in terms of individual perspectives on things but in terms of the objective situation that was independent of any individual perspective. And they came to understand their group mates not just in terms of their responsibilities to one another but also in terms of their obligation to uphold the collective normative standards agreed to by everyone in the group. Modern humans came to inhabit an objective-normative world."
- page 114
As you might notice the quotes at this point barely mention consciousness at all - like I said I take it that Tomasello thinks all mammals are conscious, and so he doesn't feel the need to talk about those later tiers of agency in terms of consciousness at all but only in terms of what the organisms are conscious of. But I stand by the things I said: in disagreement with him I do think it's completely plausible that those last tiers are key to at least one of the things we call "consciousness". That for example when we have a sense of "intending to do something" that both Tomasello & Anil Seth would argue all mammals have, we're actually mobilizing one of the "higher tiers" that other mammals *don't* have. I don't think it detracts from their view that consciousness comes in levels and subcomponents that other life shares in and justifies calling various animals "conscious", I just find it more likely than they seem to say in their books that there is a kind of consciousness that we sometimes call "consciousness" but should maybe here call "full consciousness", that only we have.