Emergence, Mind, and Consciousness

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Preface........................................................xiiiIntroduction As Simple as Possible.............................XVIIChapter 1 The Organization Effect..............................3Chapter 2 Tumbling Toward Cognition............................19Chapter 3 Mediating Aboutness..................................43Chapter 4 A Lattice of Knowers.................................61Chapter 5 A Three Streams Architecture.........................79Chapter 6 The Planning Stream..................................87Chapter 7 The Perceptual Stream................................105Chapter 8 The Interoceptive Stream.............................135Chapter 9 Thinking in Streams..................................155Chapter 10 Mapping Space and Bridging Time.....................171Chapter 11 It Binds, Therefore I Am............................193Chapter 12 The Steering Committee..............................217Chapter 13 The Upward Spiral...................................243Chapter 14 Attention Managing..................................267Chapter 15 Reaching Up With Signs..............................291Chapter 16 An Incremental Storm................................317Chapter 17 The Extended Self...................................343Chapter 18 A Cog in Cultural Minds.............................363Chapter 19 The Stuff of Consciousness..........................389Notes and References...........................................415Index..........................................................455

Chapter One

According to astrophysicists, the current instantiation of the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago with an explosive expansion, known affectionately as the Big Bang. Since that moment, energy-matter states have been expanding and interacting. New kinds of aggregate organizations with emergent properties continue to take form. Particles, elements, galaxies, stars, planets, and living organisms have all emerged in branching chains of this process. Yet the closer these phenomena get to consciousness, the more uncomfortable we seem to be with the concept of emergence. We know that mind and consciousness have emerged within living systems, and yet they sometimes seem magical and unscientific. Are the emergent properties of mind connected with the properties of matter? Should we characterize them as something real? What is necessary to create a conscious agent? As we attempt to answer these questions, our strategy will be to follow Einstein's maxim to keep our answers as simple as possible, but without oversimplifying them. Our starting place will be the concept of emergence, the idea that organizations with novel interactive properties routinely come into existence. Emergence is not some strange exotic effect. It is the normal process by which nature evolves. We are agents with emergent properties. If we are going to understand ourselves, we must become more comfortable with this idea.

The Organization Effect There is really only one science, and the various "special sciences" are just particular cases of it. This is a magnificent ideal; it is certainly much more nearly true than anyone could possibly have suspected at first sight; and investigations pursued under its guidance have certainly enabled us to discover many connexions within the external world which would otherwise have escaped our notice. But it has no trace of self-evidence; it cannot be the whole truth about the external world, since it cannot deal with the existence or the appearance of "secondary qualities" until it is supplemented by laws of the emergent type.... If we take the mechanistic ideal too seriously, we shall be in danger of ignoring or perverting awkward facts of this kind. This sort of over-simplification has certainly happened in the past in biology and physiology under the guidance of the mechanistic ideal; and it of course reaches its wildest absurdities in the attempts which have been made from time to time to treat mental phenomena mechanistically. – Charles Dunbar Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, 1925

Experience shows that simpler stuff can sometimes come together to form something with largely different properties. For example, the element sodium is a soft, silvery metal that reacts violently with water. It will ignite spontaneously in moist air or oxygen and produces severe burns on contact with the skin. It is commonly stored under nitrogen or kerosene cover to prevent it from coming in contact with the air, and it must be handled carefully when removed from cover to avoid injury. Potentially even more dangerous is the element chlorine because, as a gas, it's harder to control. When used as a weapon, this pungent, yellowish green gas causes acute respiratory damage to anyone who inhales it, and even brief exposures can be fatal. Yet the chemical combination of sodium metal with chlorine gas produces a substance with fundamentally different properties from those of its components. Sodium chloride is a solid white crystalline compound which is routinely stored in our homes in containers with porous tops. We even sprinkle it on our food. It's commonly known as table salt.

The topic which philosopher Charles Broad introduces in the quote above is often referred to as emergence, the observation that component parts sometimes interact to form combinations with novel properties. The term "emergence" was actually introduced by the philosopher George Lewes over fifty years earlier, when he attempted to distinguish between small, combinatorial chemical changes and large, discontinuous changes.

Although each effect is the resultant of its components, we cannot always trace the steps of the process, so as to see in the product the mode of operation of each factor. In the latter case, I propose to call the effect emergent. It arises out of the combined agencies, but in a form that does not display the agents in action.

Broad argues that the appearance of new properties in this manner effectively requires two types of natural laws: transordinal laws and intra-ordinal laws. Trans-ordinal laws explain the interactions which lead to the emergence of "higher-level" substances from "lower-level" ones. They explain, for example, the principles by which sodium and chlorine combine to form a new substance compound. Intra-ordinal laws, in contrast, describe the behavior and properties found within each individual substance. There are separate intra-ordinal laws that describe the behavior of sodium and chlorine, and yet other intra-ordinal laws that describe the behavior of the compound which they form. However, the intra-ordinal laws for table salt cannot be readily predicted from the intra-ordinal laws of its components. There is a qualitative shift in the behavioral properties of table salt. That's why we consider it a new substance, or more generally, a new kind of organization.

Not every new combination of parts displays largely different properties. Combining salt with water produces a mixture that is closely related to the properties of its parts. Indeed, if we look closely, we find that the mixture has a few novel properties. It conducts electrical...