61 From Beast to Brightman, An Opera of the Evolution of Consciousness in Five Acts << Prev Next >>
by: ColonelZen	IP: 16.248	rated: 0-0	posted: 2009-03-26 00:47:26
From Beast to Brightman, An Opera of the Evolution of Consciousness in Five Acts     This is my model of how human consciousness evolved. It is a gross model of how I see the larger flow of information occurring in the human brain with separation into "acts" as to what I think was present at an earlier stage versus what I think occurred in later stages. I've made some pen and paper sketches of this, but in monochrome it's hard to see what's going on amid the detail. I've tried doing it with some graphic tools on the computer using various colors, but there I turn out to be woefully inept in using so. So here is the sketch, clumbsily, in words.     I've thought of doing an extended article, but as I'm a hack business computer programmer not an academic, and this puts no money in my pocket. But I am interested, so I've put a few hours into writing this up. For now, at least, I'll leave it at this.     It's a lot clearer in my head, but getting it into a communicable medium proves difficult. Hopefully at least a few others can make sense of it and possibly find it useful and/or refine it.     Very little of this is "original" except perhaps the way I've laid it out. To be sure my introspective phenomenology, aided by some meditation practice over years has aided it, but mostly it comes from Dennett, Minsky and others I've read through the years with some late refinements by reading Edelman. There are a couple of sketches in Edelman's "Wider than the Sky" which anticipate this in some ways.     I don't think of this as necessarily a detailed and direct path of how the evolution occurred, in particular I suspect Acts 4 and 5 were fairly blended together, but drawing a boundary at any one act and saying this ended before this began would be a mistake, just as saying that the separation of various "levels" would also be a mistake. I suspect large areas of overlap, both in internal organisation of the levels and in time among the acts.         Act 1. Beasts of the Earth.     (Wherein our noble selves only react to what is before us; our history guides us but has only reinforcement of past consequences)     1) The senses come in at the top. There are very short term buffers. Senses include things like bodily state, e. g. hunger or thirst.     (cartographic note. I shall use "top" to indicate raw sensory data and "bottom" to designate the processes prior to action, but I while the "flow" is generally top to bottom I am aware that there is a great deal of side to side and even some "upwards" movement of information aside from that directly mentioned. Similarly I doubt the "levels" are as clear cut is this looks like I'n saying; this is just a crude sketch, There is very little distinction between levels save for what the result of that level of cognition is and no reason to presume any physical isolation between where each kind of informational resolution occurs)     2) The sensory data gets sliced, diced and filtered, and various data from senses gets recombined and the recombinations compared other memory of similar slice and dice at this level. When the recognisers see a "significant" correlation they pass the appropriate signals and data to the next level down (a simplification). Likewise sensory data important to action, say kinaesthetic senses are shunted very directly down to action.     3) The recombine and compare with memory at a like level goes on through many layers ... though the layers are not necessarily distinct. Higher priority recognised patterns can be shunted nearer to action more quickly (say you recognise a tiger with a toothy grin bounding your way).     4) Predecision. A decision is reached ... but this is also a decision on the significance of recent data. Information gets propagated upwards on what data was important at each level and a signal upwards may cause the information at any layer involved in the antecedent processes to be committed to longer memory for subsequent comparison and the weights and depths of the downward processes may be adjusted ... including shunting comparisons deeper at any stage.     5) Action, not directly germane to this discussion, but it is the ultimate target of our information processing so here it sits to ground things.         Act 2. Anticipation.     (We get better at using the past as a guide)     2) gets expanded into 2a, the real sensory data and pseudo-sensory data, 2b.     3) The recognisers have some mutated younger but heftier siblings ... full fledged comparators comparing the pseudo-sensory anticipatory data with the "live" data. Throughout the comparison and filtering now the comparison of the pseudo-data to the real data is part of the mix, and variance given heavier weight and shunted more deeply toward the decision level. This results in more efficiency in terms of deciding action faster but may result in some loss of potentially valuable information saved and compared relative to the earlier 3 level. Let's call these new responsibilities 3b just for consistencies sake.     4) The decision stage now takes on an additional role, itself splitting. It knows what decisions it has passed on to action and the traceback to the data from which the data was made. Aside from passing an action in 4a, new piece 4b signals 2b to take the original data out of store and build anticipatory models to match the expected results of pending action.         Act 3. The Fork in the Road.     (Wherein our hero not only uses the past as a guide but learns to anticipate the future. First level abstraction was always implicit in the slice, dice and recombination of data, but now it becomes explicit in the decision process)     2) This level now opens a drama wing, 2c. Here under direction of the new wing of level 4 (4c see below) anticipatory data much like 2b is played out... but there is no immediate sensory data with which to compare. When level 4 makes a decision the scenery anticipated here in 2c is shifted to 2b rather than regenerated on the fly from scratch. This gives added weight and import to the results of the comparators farther down.     3) New wing 3c is opened and does the recombinant comparison with past (not present) sensory data such as is handled by wing 3a. But as things are passed down the wing designation remains.     4) Well if we're adding a wing on the upper floors we need something in beneath them, so 4c opens as well. Where once 4a and 4b in concert could only reach a singular decision, the entirety of level 4 now accepts multiple possible action candidates, but if there's no emergency in progress, it defers decision and 4c tells 2c produce simulations for of the expected actions exactly as 2b would for anticipatory data, and the correlations come back down through the layers of 3 ... but tagged to know that these are simulations and which decision candidate they match (In earlier posts I've been calling 4c the producer/writer). Using this new data, perhaps iterated, 4 as a whole finally makes an action decision.         Act 4. The Puppet Master.     (Wherein we dance on tangled gossamer ourselves enweaved before on path of destiny a single step be trodden)     2) No new wing in this stage, but something just as significant, we now have an actor. By now in the memory cells of various layers there is a wealth of knowledge about what this mind has done before in various situations and the consequences that resulted. So under the direction of 4c 2c now runs the scenario with a puppet standing in for itself making different decisions up to each decision point, but instead of just the pseudo sense data being passed down, the alternate actions in similar situations are passed down.     3) As in stage 3, level 3 passes on tagged information but the correlates from the alternate action options from the events in 2c rather than just desirability weighting are passed "downward". This includes not only what one actually did in prior cases similar to the situations shown in 2c, but also the alternate options which were previously considered action candidates in that situation along with some ancillary information on why they were rejected.     4) Level 4 now gets not just base options for actions but ongoing updates of what possibilities for action arise from preceding possible actions. 4c now coordinates these ongoing threads of possible actions from the consequences of possible actions and prompts 2c to simulate them for the outside world keeping track of the decisions, actions desired and consequences, saving the earlier actions required for each step. This proceeds until immediate action is required or the plausible possibilities are exhausted and the decision to act is made and passed down.       Act 5. The Fat Lady Sings.     Nothing happens at first except that over time things get faster and better through wing c which essentially obviates the deficiency noted in Act 2. Note that all of these processes are mechanistic ... they could be called deterministic except that these happen through billions or trillions of synapses in grey goo where said synapses are triggered by a handful of molecules diffusing by brownian motion so it is impossible to say which would fire first. But of course there is significant predictability to the brain's decisions, so this "noise" is overcome by either redundancy or some kind of synchronisation mechanism.     Consciousness is now complete. It IS 2c ... with leakage from the rest of level 2 with which it is tightly coupled. Evolution doesn't care about *how* we think, but only *what* we think about ourselves in relation to the outside world ... and the only "self" the brain has to think about is the puppet actor dancing in 2c. That is the only self the brain is aware of, and "self", The Mind's I to use Dennett's title is just the relationship - both past and projected for various alternate and future scenarios in relationship to the outside world. Until we get where we are today, discussing the how's of how the mind works among ourselves, there isn't any value in knowing more about it the self than how it reacts to potential outside phenomena, and nothing on the outside cares about whether the whole animal decides upon action or just a few million neurons at such and such place(s) in the brain.     But language happens. This throws a monkey in to wrench the machinery ... adding a lot of monkey grease to speed things up. What, in terms of making decisions were once solely internal representations and abstractions which could have remained close to their original sensory predicates, now have to be rendered solely as sounds in a highly abstracted format. It is now necessary to look at and describe the predilections of the self, already in at least first level abstraction as per Act 3, in this alternate representation, words. Thus second level abstraction becomes a necessary part of our mental machinery. This rerepresentation of the self often involves MANY iterations through 2c down through 4c, and 3c becomes hugely populated with these second level abstractions and their consequences.     This in turn, means that we focus more and more upon our representation of ourselves and our options as puppets in the theater. The image of self becomes habituated on the self as representation, with options in a fluid future. We see ourselves as having "free will" because of the fluidity of the future even though the machinery is mechanistic because that is what we see in 2c, the Cartesian Theater, even though that is a small part of our minds and the work is actually happening mostly in levels 3 and 4.     The ability to share these second level abstractions through language and build upon them gives us the capability to store and share information across time and space. This in turn gives us the power of dominion over the earth. We can be fruitful and multiply ... or subdue it...     And the fat lady sings ...       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7rZEKClk4 (she ain't fat, rather cute in my opinion, but it's her voice I'm in love with, Bocelli's voice is pretty good too.)     -- TWZ