Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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RogerSH
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Can consciousness be explained by “emergence”?

Post by RogerSH »

Almost all of science - all except for the physics of space-time and fundamental particles - deals with “emergent” entities and properties, but the significance of this concept is, it seems to me, often misrepresented or misunderstood. Here is a brief summary of what I think are the key points, and the relevance for the suggestion of emergence as an “explanation” of consciousness.

The natural world largely consists of a hierarchy of things made up of smaller things – take for example: a foam made up of, in turn, soap bubbles, liquid films, molecules, atoms, nuclei & electrons, protons & neutrons, quarks….

A key observation is that the rules of behaviour at each level may be entirely and often strikingly different from those at the level below. Indeed, in general there is a sense (to be described next) in which the higher level behaviour cannot even be strictly derived from that of the lower level. This is what is meant when the higher level behaviour is described as “emergent”: it “emerges” as a novel attribute from the assembly of the elements. Another key observation is that the actual nature of the ingredients is often of secondary importance; it is their arrangement that dominates the higher level behaviour. Many different liquids make very similar bubbles.

The behaviour of any single instance of a higher level assembly – such as a particular soap bubble at a particular instant - can, evidently, be derived in principle from the behaviour of all the elements acting together, even though in practice the simultaneous solution of trillions of equations describing the interaction of each pair of molecules is something that one would never attempt. However, when we turn from a single instance to a type, we are by definition eliminating the distinction between one instance and another, a process of approximation known to scientists as “coarse-graining”, and this is why higher level behaviour of types cannot be derived just from lower level behaviour. There also needs to be an informed guess as to how to approximate that behaviour – the next thing to be considered.

In practice, the rules of higher level behaviour can be found in one of two ways. One is to observe many cases, either of the real thing or of a simulation, to form hypotheses about the rules, and to test the hypotheses under enough different conditions to provide adequate corroboration. This doesn’t properly serve as an “explanation”, though. The other method is to guess how to approximate the rules of the lower level (which themselves will usually be approximations, of course) in such a way that higher levels rules can be derived by a mathematical analysis. Thus in the case of a soap bubble, approximations to the rules of intermolecular attraction enable the phenomena of thin-film stability and surface tension to be derived, and then with further approximations and a theorem of solid geometry, the phenomena of spherical bubbles can be predicted. Given that this phenomenon is observed, the guessed approximations may be presumed to be sound. This counts as a true “explanation”. In practice, most scientific knowledge is a hybrid of these two approaches. For example, crystallography convincingly explains many of the characteristics of metal fatigue – the emergent behaviour of assemblies of flawed crystals – but numerous tests are needed to provide the actual data on which statistical fatigue life prediction depends.

Emergence is not at all the same as evolution (since it applies equally to inanimate entities such as bubbles), although the potency of emergence does explain the enormous plethora of novel types of entity that have emerged in the living world, and natural selection then explains how many of them have come to endure. In recent years in such fields as microbiology, quite extraordinary and wholly unforeseeable behaviours of complex molecules have been discovered, and substantially explained by their extraordinarily complex molecular structure.

Many emergent entities (even soap bubbles) can be described as “self-organising” structures, a phenomenon that reveals the limits of “toppling domino” models of causality which disregard the hierarchic nature of the material world. A self-organising structure that emerges behaves like an initial cause at its own level in the hierarchy.

How does all this apply to the phenomena of consciousness? The fact that the brain is the most complex and dynamic compact structure known to science shows that there is scope for a hierarchy of structures of logical relationship to form that has far more levels even than that of a single cell, and with each level introducing new types of structure with new kinds of behaviour, it would be sheer stupidity to rule out any kind of behaviour as a priori “inexplicable” on such a basis merely because we haven’t the imagination to guess what the explanation might be.

However, there is a major caveat. Consciousness is unique in being the means by which explanations are understood, which makes certain kinds of explanation inapplicable. The output of an objective theory is necessarily objective, so that to seek a direct explanation of “what consciousness feels like” is a confusion of categories. Nevertheless, consciousness has many objective attributes, such as the capabilities it provides, so continuing the search for emergent structures that explain these attributes is an entirely rational way to proceed.
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