VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

A. Natural Econsciousness and Ecognition

Seager, William. Natural Fabrications. Berlin: Springer, 2012. From the Frontiers Collection, due by September, the University of Toronto philosopher offers his opus that “…ponders the question of how emergence should be understood within the scientific picture, and whether a complete vision of the world can be attained that includes consciousness.” Keywords include: Cellular Automata - Consciousness Scenarios - Emergence of a Classical World - Mental Causation - Ontological Emergence - Reductionism and Antireductionism - Top-Down Causality - Weak vs. Strong Emergence.

Seth, Anil. Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tz6an. The University of Sussex neuroscientist and actual philosopher is the popular author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Dutton, 2021). This June 2024 43 page essay proceeds to broadly consider whether the prolific AI phenomenon could attain some manner of sentient awareness. Its main theme considers a variety of neural net computational methods as they may learn, be informed and flicker.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop, we ought to ask whether AI systems can be not only intelligent, but also conscious. I consider why some people think AI might develop consciousness, identifying some biases that lead us astray. I ask what it would take for conscious AI to be a realistic prospect, pushing back against some common assumptions such as the notion that computation provides a sufficient basis for consciousness. I’ll instead make the case for taking seriously the possibility that consciousness might depend on our nature as living organisms – a form of biological naturalism. I will end by exploring some ethical considerations arising from AI that either actually is, or seems to be, conscious. (Abstract)

The final scenario is strong biological naturalism. This is the idea that consciousness inheres in the materiality of living system in a similar way to how storms depend on real water and real wind. While I favour some form of biological naturalism, it is difficult to reliably assess the relative plausibility of these scenarios. Laying them out here serves two main purposes. It reminds us not to assume that conscious AI is inevitable. And it underlines the urgency of better understanding the mechanisms responsible for biological consciousness. (33)

Shaw, Robert and Jeffery Kinsella-Shaw. Hints of Intelligence from First Principles. Ecological Psychology. 24/1, 2012. In a special issue on this title subject edited by Michael Turvey and Claudia Carello, University of Connecticut ecopsychologists record, if of a mind to allow and do so, many signs of a proactive cognizance from physical particles and black holes to an intentional thermodynamics, singularities, and universe self-tuning. As a result, an evolutionary emergence unto human cultural acumen can be validly traced back to cosmic origins, as an intrinsic creative source. See also in this issue Self-Organization, Entropy Production, and Physical Intelligence by Dilip Kondepudi, and Guidelines for Inquiry into the Hypothesis of Physical Intelligence by the editors.

Are intelligent systems necessarily biological or might they be only physical? We propose that a system be deemed intelligent if its actions exhibit intentional dynamics. A lower bound on intelligence appears in such diverse physical systems as black holes making anticipatory adjustments to approaching matter and particles choosing among myriad possible steps the next least action step. While thermodynamic laws are known to govern black hole dynamics and cosmological evolution, we show their role in intentional dynamics is analogous—suggesting a new field of intentional thermodynamics. Perhaps systems are intelligent if they conserve the action potential identified by intentional dynamics—one comprising information and control as interacting duals. Hence a foundational mini-max principle is proposed, namely, that the rate at which entropy production is maximized varies inversely with the rate at which this action potential is minimized. Intentional thermodynamics' geometry is shown to be a path space whose solutions are goal-paths, i.e., paths that conserve the action potential. Finally, we ask if physical intelligence might not have been produced during the Big Bang. (Abstract)

Skrbina, David. Transcending Consciousness: Thoughts on a Universal Conception of Mind. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 16/5, 2009. A University of Michigan philosopher argues it is a “brute fact of existence” that “all things that exist – from atoms and rocks, to tables and chairs, to human beings, planets, and stars” are suffused by an innate mental life. Skrbina is also the editor of a forthcoming book Mind that Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium (John Benjamins, 2009).

Skrbina, David, ed. Mind that Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. A 21st century collection that aims to revive and affirm the perennial intimation, out of favor in the reign of moribund matter, that knowing sentience must fundamentally, obviously, ground and suffuse extant existence. From Greek hylomorphic vitalism to today’s “hylonoetic” dynamic systems theory, nature is to be seen as alive and aware in both its implicate and explicate realms. To the Australian philosopher Freya Matthews, this essence, deeply imbued in Eastern wisdom, escapes the West because of a pernicious mechanistism. Such “universal interconnectedness” thus serves to form and illume a “panrelational” reality. Some 19 chapters, including an overview and summation by the University of Michigan editor, offer a timely contribution. But must we await the passing of the Ptolemaic machine to a Copernican cosmic genesis until this once and future milieu can truly be admitted?

Some are prepared to go further and claim that this alleged brute emergence of mind – mind from mindless matter – is not only problematic, it is incomprehensible. This fact was recognized already by Epicurus, who argued that human will could not emerge from deterministic atoms, and therefore that atoms themselves possessed a small degree of will (hence, Panpsychism), Telesio, Patrizi, Gilbert, Campanella, Fechner, Paulsen, Clifford, Strong, Teilhard, and Wright all used versions of the same argument on behalf of panpsychism. (Skrbina,3)

Stapp, Henry. Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics. Berlin: Springer, 2004. A philosophically inclined physicist at the University of California at Berkeley describes a cosmic nature which by its quantum essence is necessarily suffused by observant consciousness. These quotes epitomize the Copernican revolution we are trying to gather and report.

The central theme of…this article is the tremendous difference in the scientific understanding of the dynamics of the conscious brain that emerges from orthodox quantum theory, with its essential introduction of the active human agent-participant, as contrasted to classical physics. (233) A major revolution occurred in science during the twentieth century. This change leads to a profound transformation of the scientific conception of human beings. (265) The physical world thus becomes an evolving structure of information, and of propensities for experiences to occur, rather than a mechanically evolving mindless material structure. (268)

Stapp, Henry. Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Berlin: Springer, 2007. Due in August from the philosophical physicist, the quote is from the book web page. If fully appreciated what is implied is a Human Universe wherein phenomenal people are required to bring it into observed selfhood.

The classical mechanistic idea of nature that prevailed in science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an essentially mindless conception: the physically described aspects of nature were asserted to be completely determined by prior physically described aspects alone, with our conscious experiences entering only passively. During the twentieth century the classical concepts were found to be inadequate. In the new theory, quantum mechanics, our conscious experiences enter into the dynamics in specified ways not fixed by the physically described aspects alone. Consequences of this radical change in our understanding of the connection between mind and brain are described.

Strawson, Galen. Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism. Anthony Freeman, ed. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2006. This is the lead target chapter for a peer review, which includes a chapter by Skrbina, of the CCNY philosopher’s conviction that experiental mind is innate to the material structure of the universe. Since consciousness cannot emergence from its absence, ergo it must be there in an original essence.

Swan, Liz Stillwaggon and Louis Goldberg. Introduction: Mentis Naturalis. Biosemiotics. Online March, 2013. This special Origins of Mind issue follows a book with the same title edited by LS, noted herein, to further explore how the emergence of knowing sentience in entities and nature need be grounded in, indeed requires, a creative mind-suffused cosmos to arise from. Indeed such a basis seems to inform and infuse every other culture and age but our own. Papers include Cephalopod Cognition in an Evolutionary Context by Joseph Vitti, The Origin of Mind: The Mind-Matter Continuity Thesis, Yoshimi Kawade, and The Origin of Cellular Life and Biosemiotics by Attila Grandpierre.

A central underlying premise of the origins of mind project is that we will make more progress on understanding the phenomenon of mindedness if we conceptualize it as a natural process instead of as an object. The long tradition in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science of conceptualizing the mind as an object leads to the practice of forcing poor analogies between the mind and some object mainly because we are in a better position to understand the object - I am thinking here, of course, of the computer. Computationalism, the idea that the human brain is a computer and thus discoveries made in silicon are applicable to the human brain, has ultimately led us further away from a genuine understanding of organic mindedness. (2) I want to ask, is there a more useful paradigm for understanding organic mindedness than a machine that we created from non-organic materials? (2)

Biosemiotics provides a new conceptual space that attracts thinkers in the biological and cognitive sciences and the humanities who recognize continuity in the biosphere from the simplest to the most complex organisms, and who are united in the project of trying to account for even language and human consciousness in this comprehensive picture of life. The young interdiscipline of biosemiotics has thus far been largely focused on codes, signs and sign processes in the microworld. What philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists can contribute to the growing interdiscipline are insights into how the biosemiotic weltanschauung applies to complex organisms like humans where such sign processes and codes constitute human society and culture. (2)

What is the distribution of cognitive ability within the animal kingdom? It would be egalitarian to assume that variation in intelligence is everywhere clinal, but examining trends among major phylogenetic groups, it becomes easy to distinguish high-performing ‘generalists’ – whose behavior exhibits domain-flexibility – from ‘specialists’ whose range of behavior is limited and ecologically specific. These generalists include mammals, birds, and, intriguingly, cephalopods. By identifying the cognitive similarities between these organisms and vertebrates, we can begin to derive some general principles of intelligence as a biological phenomenon. Here, I discuss trends in cephalopod behavior and surrounding theory, and suggest their significance for our understanding of domain-general cognition and its evolution. (Vitti Abstract)

Swan, Liz, ed. Origins of Mind. Berlin: Springer, 2013. Philosopher and psychologist Elizabeth Stillwaggon Swan relates that in 2010 she sent out a call for papers for an anthology to explore innate sources in physical nature and evolutionary development of organic mindfulness. It turned out that a project to trace the vital roots of ascending informed awareness is of wide interest but with scant treatment, so a copious response ensued. This Volume 8 in Springer’s Biosemiotics series offers select chapters that broach how our human linguistic consciousness must and does have an integral continuity with the phenomenal essences of a lively cosmos. For flavor, chapters include Organic Codes and the Natural History of Mind by Marcello Barbieri, Evolving Consciousness: The Very Idea! by James Fetzer, and Concept Combination and the Origins of Complex Cognition by Liane Gabora and Kirsty Kitto (search). With many good papers, Liz Swan went on, joined by Andy Winters, to edit a special 2013 issue of Biosemiotics (6/3) with the same title, also reviewed herein.

Tarlaci, Sultan, ed. NeuroQuantology: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Neuroscience and Quantum Physics. www.neuroquantology.com. There is another universe next door if we could just imagine and find its key. Our perennial, historic wisdom is founded upon a mirror refraction between microcosmic human and a numinous macrocosm. A recent contribution may be such papers as published this European journal, accessible in full at this site, which try to express and qualify such an accord in terms of nascent scientific frontiers. For a good example, see Francisco Di Biase above. But a need remains to explain its unfamiliar terms, like the journal title, to move beyond the particle physics paradigm, (see Brian Josephson’s attempt) and to be able to communicate these enlightenments to a wider audience.

Welcome to the "NeuroQuantology", a new journal designed to bring to you a critical analysis of the best of the world neuroscience and quantum physics literature, written by neuroscientist and physicist. NeuroQuantology is a journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of quantum physics and its relation to the nervous system. NeuroQuantology publishes material relevant to that exploration from the perspectives afforded by the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Taube, Mieczyslaw and Klaus Leenders. The Search for Terrestrial Intelligence. Singapore: World Scientific, 1998. An exploration of cosmic to human evolution in terms of the ascent of cognitive qualities and their knowledge content. In its emergent course, the universe creates life, which breeds biotic information processing and cerebral ramification leading on to a global sentience potentially able to care for and protect the planet from which it has arisen.

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