Consciousness: what it is, where it comes from, do machines can have it and why do we care?

[Samson]

Bumblebees teach puzzles to friends

Researchers who set up a confusing puzzle box with a sweet reward revealed that bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) can learn skills from others that they could not acquire alone — a behaviour thought to be unique to people. After showing that no lone bee could work out how to solve the puzzle, the scientists painstakingly trained nine bees how to do it. The trained bees became demonstrators for other bees, who watched, learnt and won their reward.

Spoiler 7 min youtube about it :

Can you offer your definition of consciousness or its threshold?

When an electron "senses" a photon and "reacts" by moving to a higher energy level that behaviour seems to be probabilisticly determined by the equations of quantum mechanics. When I sense photons coming from a speeding car or a pint of beer and react by moving towards or away from the object that behaviour seems to be determined by me. The difference is what we call consciousness. Where the threshold is seems to be the core question.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Bumblebees teach puzzles to friends

Researchers who set up a confusing puzzle box with a sweet reward revealed that bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) can learn skills from others that they could not acquire alone — a behaviour thought to be unique to people. After showing that no lone bee could work out how to solve the puzzle, the scientists painstakingly trained nine bees how to do it. The trained bees became demonstrators for other bees, who watched, learnt and won their reward.

Spoiler 7 min youtube about it :

When an electron "senses" a photon and "reacts" by moving to a higher energy level that behaviour seems to be probabilisticly determined by the equations of quantum mechanics. When I sense photons coming from a speeding car or a pint of beer and react by moving towards or away from the object that behaviour seems to be determined by me. The difference is what we call consciousness. Where the threshold is seems to be the core question.

Yes. And in my opinion, I'd put that threshold of the most rudimentary form of "awareness/consciousness" somewhere down at the level where physical matter takes form be it chemical, molecular, atomic interactions. Perhaps the photon level is "a bridge too far?" Consciousness outside of physical things gets us into woo woo land.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

A common mistake some people make about evolution is that they view it from the wrong direction.
It is easiest to understand by only looking backwards. (I'm ignoring speculative biology which tries to predict what critters could evolve. The Future is Wild is a great video series on that.)

The best book on evolution I've read that deliberately avoids "forward progress" is The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. It is in the spirit of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the stories told by pilgrims as they make their way to some place to see, I dunno, the tibia of a saint or something.

Going backwards from homo sapiens to the last common ancestor is the perfect way to understand evolutionary processes because there is no chance of making the error of thinking that evolution is working towards some inevitable improvement.

There are several species of fish that live in Lake Victoria, some in open water, some in caves. Some of the cave dwellers, after millions of years, are blind whereas the open water fish have two eyes. That seems counterintuitive to some people: Why would an animal lose such a seemingly important sense? And what happens to all that cellular and neuronal machinery that was dedicated to vision?

It all has to do with energy expenditure and what actually is an advantage in the particular environment the creatures find themselves. If less energy is expended on vision and its associated cellular machinery, then there is more available for other, more important features and traits to develop, if that advantage leads to more progeny than its two-eyed competitors.

And so it is with "consciousness". It is not guaranteed to increase because the animal is more complex if it doesn't have an advantage that eventually leads to having more progeny than its competitors. Regressing may be the best stategy during a particular epoch for some creatures. It doesn't mean that the ability (e.g. higher level of consciousness, whatever that is in fish) is necessarily lost forever. It is still, in general, still locked into its genetics.

A very recent study is the first to show how some traits that a species possesses now are traceable back to similar traits that disappeared in the past, then re-emerged, or they were independently recreated, as it were, anew. That doesn't mean that it's possible to predict what traits an animal will have in the future, only that they are possible. There is no way that we can predict with any degree of certainty what environment that creature will be exposed to in the distant future, i.e. over time scales that evolution operates over.

I do accept, however, that humans are very different in that we can keep alive many individuals who would otherwise not have been able to live to sexual maturity. "Transhumanity" is yet another.

If @Samson or others with actual biology training would like to wade in, I'd really appreciate it.
I'm getting out of my depth and starting to flounder. (Pun intended.)

Others could try to tell us what they think 1% less or 1% more "consciousness" would entail.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Yes. And in my opinion, I'd put that threshold of the most rudimentary form of "awareness/consciousness" somewhere down at the level where physical matter takes form be it chemical, molecular, atomic interactions. Perhaps the photon level is "a bridge too far?" Consciousness outside of physical things gets us into woo woo land.

There have been attempts to associate memory formation with "photons" and diffraction patterns caused by gaps (grids) between microtubules in neurons, but I'm not convinced. The image is of four slits creating what is known as a "Talbot carpet".



I do like the hypothesis that memories could be stored in some way along the outside of the tubes. Maybe large protein molecules, among others (my dumb idea) dynein and kinesin, could change or restore patterns.

I love the animation of kinesin walking along a microtubule. Should be renamed to kawiien.

Now, imagine a microtubule sliced lengthwise to get something like this...

I can also imagine some kind of coding scheme "imprinted" on that existing pattern.
And hey, there are 8 bits across the pattern, so it's a byte. So convenient!

There's an interesting video describing various aspects of Orch OR

Orchestrated objective reduction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

on youtube.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

And so it is with "consciousness". It is not guaranteed to increase because the animal is more complex if it doesn't have an advantage that eventually leads to having more progeny than its competitors. Regressing may be the best stategy during a particular epoch for some creatures. It doesn't mean that the ability (e.g. higher level of consciousness, whatever that is in fish) is necessarily lost forever. It is still, in general, still locked into its genetics.

Surely this reasoning depends on the assumption that consciousness is some distinct property divorced from brain complexity. Given that there still doesn't seem to be any generally agreed upon definition of consciousness this doesn't seem sound. And indeed if it is just some emergent property of the brain, which is at least plausible if not likely, then in that case it would be inexorably linked to complexity.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Surely this reasoning depends on the assumption that consciousness is some distinct property divorced from brain complexity. Given that there still doesn't seem to be any generally agreed upon definition of consciousness this doesn't seem sound. And indeed if it is just some emergent property of the brain, which is at least plausible if not likely, then in that case it would be inexorably linked to complexity.

Sure, and that's why I used the loss of vision as an example.
There is a lot of "brain complexity" and cellular machinery dedicated to maintaining sight. When that is no longer an advantage and is lost in favour of some other traits, then is the brain less complex?
Maybe not. Maybe, if larger fins lead to more progeny, which is the ultimate evolutionary arbiter.
But, as I asked before, what does 1% more or 1% less "consciousness" even mean?
I don't know. Trying to define 100% consciousness is already like nailing jelly to the ceiling.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Not really related, but just a tangent because of the discussion of eyes. It seems to me that the sense of vision (possibly coupled with the sense of sound) might be strongly linked to the sense of where "I" am. Despite my entire body conveying a sense of touch, temperature, pain etc, I definitely think of my feet as being "down there" rather than my head as being "up there". I would be curious to know how strong this sensation is comparatively with people who lack a sense of sight, sound or both (I can't imagine taste or smell having such a strong "locating" effect). I think it would be interesting if someone born without either of these senses and who had never experience them still had a strong sense of the head as being where the "driver" is.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Not really related, but just a tangent because of the discussion of eyes. It seems to me that the sense of vision (possibly coupled with the sense of sound) might be strongly linked to the sense of where "I" am. Despite my entire body conveying a sense of touch, temperature, pain etc, I definitely think of my feet as being "down there" rather than my head as being "up there". I would be curious to know how strong this sensation is comparatively with people who lack a sense of sight, sound or both (I can't imagine taste or smell having such a strong "locating" effect). I think it would be interesting if someone born without either of these senses and who had never experience them still had a strong sense of the head as being where the "driver" is.

Quick answer: there are neurons that are specific to knowing up and down. Also another "sense" I mentioned called "vestibular" which is related to balance.
IIRC pyramidal neurons (one of the roughly 5,000 types we know of) are responsible, but don't hold me to it.

A Nobel prize for medicine(?) a few years ago was awarded for the discovery of neuronal maps in the brain and what are known as "place cells". There are a couple of great youtube videos I'm sure will answer your questions (and no doubt raise more).
What is really, really fascinating IMO is that the same "structures" for maintaining maps of physical space in our brains are also used for maintaining "maps" of social relationships.
Flamboyant young presenter, but really beautifully illustrated concepts. Five (hexagonal) stars!

 

[EvaDK]

For those interested, Robert Lawrence Kuhn asks questions to top tier scientists and researchers about physics, astronomy, life, meta-physics and consciousness on his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@CloserToTruthTV

As a student of science himself, he asks good questions and try his best to make the interviews accessible and interesting for everyone interested.

 

[Birdjaguar]

And a less precise measure of how consciousness is all around us.

A new study by the University of British Columbia shows that it is possible to reduce the stress cows experience during routine handling, turning their encounters with humans into something playfully anticipated.

By using a food reward system to encourage the animals to enter a chute for handling by humans, it was observed that the trained group displayed more play behavior, such as jumping and running, than the control group.

“The increases in play behaviors suggest that positive reinforcement training had a positive effect on the animals’ emotional state before handling,” researcher Jennifer Heinsius wrote in the Journal of Dairy Science.

 

[EvaDK]

I believe food reward systems work on positively affecting the human emotional state too.
Especially when the taste of chocolate is involved.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Robert Sapolsky mentioned that judges in Israel were more likely to grant bail applications after lunch, rather than just before when they were starting to get hungry.

His 2010 Stanford lecture series on "Human Behavioral Biology" is one of the best I've seen.
It might be a bit dated now, of course.