How Consciousness Evolved: An Essay Review of Douglas Hofstadter's Book I am a Strange Loop
It shouldn't come as a surprise that consciousness is the most recent evolutionary adaptation of the self-organizing, systemically driven machine that is the human brain.
While theres no ghost in this machine, the author reveals that during the brains most recent evolutionary development, an adaptive maneuver occurred that appears remarkably like a clever bit of magic.
When certain apes learned to use their brains to transform perceptions into symbols, they permanently separated themselves from all other animals, including their closest ape relatives.
The central focus of this book is to unravel the intricate process behind this magical transformation, exploring how we've come to comprehend, describe, and even rely on it.
Explaining this phenomenon is complex, and Douglas Hofstadter rises to the challenge with clarity and precision in his explanations and analogies.
What is Consciousness?
In essence, consciousness is merely the intricate evolutionary manifestations of perception, a hierarchical structure of recursive symbolization, as it were.
As Dr. Mark Solms and Dr. Karl Fristons research has revealed, this process must have emerged early in the evolution of organic life.
Professor Fristons lab in England demonstrated that proto-perception can be simulated in the lab by simply stimulating a population of randomly dancing particles.
When left to their own devices, these random particles spontaneously organized into distinct inner, outer, active, and sensory clumps. Subsequently, they learned to recognize their existence as separate clumps.
Therefore, arguably, even before the emergence of one-cell animals, we possessed the rudiments of perception in the form of sensing clumps of matter exhibiting the abilities of proto-conscious animals.
Regardless of the exact timeline or mechanism of perceptions origin, it is widely documented that it plays a pivotal role in organizing consciousness.
Perceptions that lead to consciousness have evolved progressively from simple reactive binary comparisons to sensitively constructed hierarchies of symbols, which eventually transformed into symbolic actions and forms.
However, confusion arises when we attempt to describe and name the processing and causation that occur at different stages of perceptual development and at various levels of brain organization.
For instance, we understand that the ultimate level of causation takes place at the fine-grained neuronal brain mechanics level of brain organization. However, the complexity at this level is overwhelming, making it impossible to provide an effective description or even name its significance.
Neuroscientists like Nobel Laureates Vernon B. Mountcastle and Gerald Edelman, along with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, have elucidated how perception operates at this fine-grained neuronal level.
Perception begins with simple binary comparisons, which are then categorized. This category sense data is encoded using a single algorithm across all sensing modalities before being passed upstream to the cortex as neuronal impulses.
Its important to note that brain modules along this route engage in the same operation of reducing and compressing neuronal data. Millions of packets of neurons are shuttled up and down neuronal pathways to appropriate compression stations, from which they emerge as more coarse-grained and compressed neuronal outputs. At this stage, we have learned to recognize and label these compressed, more coarse-grained mid-path outputs as symbols. At this symbolic level, the description of processing and causation becomes nameable and makes perfect sense as meaningful perceptual outputs.
Ultimately, this book aims to solve the challenging problem of constructing, simply and elegantly, with a touch of Godelieran flair, the recursive hierarchical tower of symbolization that we refer to as consciousness.
Godel's theorems, introduced as a control variable, makes it abundantly clear that consciousness is nothing more than a complex set of mathematical transformations embedded within a hierarchy of recursively nested symbols. In essence, consciousness is merely an illusion of symbolic representations constructed upon symbolic representations.
This illusory hierarchical tower of symbols is called consciousness. Its significance lies in its recursive self-referential nature, which serves as a pointer identifying the brains owner as an entity existing in the world.
It turns out that this self-referential knowledge of their own existence, is unique to homo sapiens, and has proven to be of immense survival value to them.
In short, this book attempts to answer the question: How does an evolved self-organizing machine get to know of its own existence?
The correct answer is, it doesn't.
Learning the trick of pretending to know of our own existence, increases our chances of survival. So pretending to know of our own existence is the illusion necessary to underwrite the kind of survival that allows Homo sapiens mastery over the world. Five stars
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