Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Libaw: A Darwinian Look at Consciousness

Good for Something, or Good for Nothing?
A Darwinian Look at Consciousness
By William H. Libaw ; Ed. Cynthia Reeser

When we ask what “good” is consciousness in an evolutionary context, we are asking, “Of what Darwinian benefit is consciousness to a creature that has it?” As consciousness persisted after (presumed) accidental long-ago origins as a mutation, Darwinian theory suggests it may have been good in the sense of being adaptive, of helping creatures with it to survive and prosper.

This article presents recent work on this subject first. Then it offers the following new hypothesis: Only when the long-ago environment changed drastically was consciousness of adaptive value to the creatures that had it. Explored next is how this new idea might be developed into a testable theory. Lastly examined is the contrary Darwinian belief: Consciousness was not of any evolutionary value to any of the creatures with it. Thus, consciousness was—and still is—good for nothing.

This article follows most of those who study consciousness in presuming that it originated as a long-ago chance genetic mutation; pertinent quotations from the writings of several of those scientists and philosophers are provided below. That assumption of an ancient mutation is based on the belief in a cause-and-effect natural world; it is not based on factual evidence. The latter is so because it is uncommonly difficult for (objective) science to obtain factual evidence regarding immaterial-seeming (subjective) consciousness.

There are two potential properties of chance mutations: (1) they are adaptive (in the Darwinian sense of being beneficial to those with it) and (2) they are non-adaptive (of no net benefit to the possessors). This article suggests that consciousness was initially not of adaptive value to its holders. That was so because their slowly-accumulated prior adaptive mutations were good enough for the creatures living then. Although consciousness provided them with experiences (such as pain and pleasure), it did not add significantly to their success in increasing their numbers.

Given these assumptions, further information about the hypothesis this article presents of what’s “good” (beneficial in the Darwinian sense) about consciousness:

Only when the environment changed drastically and suddenly long long ago was consciousness of significant benefit to the creatures who had it. Whereas their nonconscious (robot-like) peers had only out-of-date Darwinian adaptations to help them, so they failed to flourish in a changed world. Those early creatures with and without consciousness may have been fish or early land creatures with simpler and smaller brains than the land animals and the mammals that followed. Consciousness provided the creatures who had it with the spark of feeling and belief that ignites a long-burning ego. That spark pushed each conscious creature (in those long-ago changed times) to achieve a better life for itself.

Note that creatures without consciousness are referred to here as nonconscious, rather than as unconscious or subconscious. That is done to stay away from the needless psychological connotations of the latter two words. Note also that the word “experiencing” is used to generalize all the various ways of being conscious, such as feeling and believing.

First looked at here are writings by scientists and philosophers that are pertinent to the general idea that consciousness is valuable as a Darwinian adaptation. Explored next is the central theme of this article, which is a new hypothesis from this writer: Only when the environment changed drastically was consciousness of major value to the creatures that had it. That idea was originally presented in this writer’s book, How We Got To Be Human: Subjective Minds with Objective Bodies 1. Lastly examined is how this explanation might be expanded into a testable theory.

In an article, “The consciousness puzzle 2,” Psychology professor David P. Barash tells us that, although work is being done on the neurobiological “how” of consciousness, “there is another side of bona fide consciousness research that has received all too little attention: Why consciousness exists in the first place.” Barash frames the question like this, “Biologically, consciousness seems hard to justify, if only because it . . . is bound to be energetically expensive. What is the compensating payoff?” Although, as Barash notes, no one yet knows the ultimate “why” of consciousness, the present article offers an answer by suggesting that it would have helped some long-ago possessors to survive in a changed world.

In Evolving the Mind 3, molecular biologist A.G. Cairns-Smith writes, “if it was natural selection that [made us] then there must be consequences to feelings; they must have actual physical effects or there is no reason to expect that the means to produce them would have evolved.” Cairns-Smith goes on to describe a difficult part of the “how” problem—how immaterial-seeming consciousness can cause material activity. However, the present article does not center on the “how” problem; it focuses on why consciousness was an adaptation.

Nicholas Humphrey (a psychologist and a philosopher) has written extensively about consciousness. In The Mind Made Flesh 4, Humphrey provides a chapter with the pertinent title, “The Uses of Consciousness.” He notes there that the brain can do much of its activity non-consciously and that, because consciousness came into being by natural selection, it is reasonable to assume that it assists its possessors in surviving.

In A History of the Mind 5, Humphrey asks “How Far Does the Scope of Consciousness Extend in Nature?” He rules out low life forms such amoebae, worms, and fleas on the grounds that they do not have enough of a brain to enable consciousness. He suggests that caution might limit the candidates to vertebrates such as mammals and birds.

However, Humphrey’s main interest there is in relating the material brain with the immaterial-seeming mind and self of human beings. Thus he does not explore the Darwinian survival value of consciousness as such, nor does he search for an origin in lower animals.

Psychologist Bill Faw is the author of “What We Know and What We Don’t About Consciousness Science,” an article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 6. The article notes a presentation by Derek Denton about “the possible primal emergence of consciousness . . . [as] feelings of hunger, thirst . . . and the like.” The article describes evidence of (conscious) thirst feelings from measurement of the rapid drinking habits of sheep and cows in vulnerable drinking areas—all of which suggests that early animal consciousness, in the shape of basic negative and positive feelings, was useful and perhaps adaptive. Note that “useful” would not be “adaptive” if the benefits did not exceed the presumed costs of energy.

For consciousness to be an adaptation, experiencing things must be more than a no-influence side-effect like a train’s whistle, which does not help to move the vehicle. Experiencing something (such as extreme hunger when weary) must cause brain activity and thus (at times) result in subsequent behavior. For example, when a creature is both hungry and tired, it learns the painful lesson that it must spend more time pursuing prey and less time resting. Note that, even for a robot-like nonconscious creature, a novel situation might elicit some new neural brain activity and then new behavior as an immediate reaction. When a similar situation recurs, it is likely to stimulate a similar reaction. Evidence for this kind of behavior in a nonconscious creature is lacking, as existing science cannot discern which creatures have consciousness and which live without it.

Consider next the novel situation of a long-ago major change in the environment. Such a shift would have greatly reduced the value of the once-adaptive changes in the brains of slowly evolving (robot-like) nonconscious creatures such as primitive fish. Those creatures’ abilities to learn might not have been enough to deal with the difficult new world at hand. If consciousness came to some of those individuals, their feeling such things as shortages of food and water would have pushed them to learn better ways of coping. It is the resulting more helpful behavior (if it more than pays for the presumed extra-energy costs of consciousness) that made experiencing things in times of major change not just novel but a Darwinian adaptation. Perhaps in the future, when we understand the brain structure and activity that results in consciousness, and when we are familiar with the genetic structure that leads to that brain structure, we will be able to conduct pertinent experiments with simple creatures to test this thesis.

Looking at some of our own conduct can be helpful with understanding how things happened long ago. First, use temporal examples to separate two ways that consciousness could conceivably influence human behavior:

Note, however, that scientist Benjamin Libet’s provocative experiments on the timing of consciousness (described in Brain 7) suggest that about a half-second passes between neurological activity and subsequent related (conscious) experiencing. That implies that consciousness cannot contribute to a person’s immediate response to an event (because there is a delay before consciousness itself can happen). So the first way above must be abandoned and only the second used.

The above example indirectly suggests something else: At times, humans can experience what’s happening around us concurrently (but not instantaneously), and at other times people can partake nonconsciously in a similar happening. In a report by Mary Osborne and Susan Blackmore describing the 2006 conference Toward a Science of Consciousness 8, there is an example of this. Car drivers “can arrive at their destination to [realize] that they have no recollection of having driven there. They may say that they were conscious of listening to music or having a conversation, but not of driving. . . .” In such cases it is evident that the car was appropriately steered, slowed and speeded as a result of the driver’s nonconscious neural activity alone. Also, when car drivers encounter specific roads for the first time, they do so by paying conscious attention to driving.

This example of current human activity is consistent with two basic ideas about early consciousness. The first is that primitive life forms were nonconscious. Second, in a novel situation, consciousness resulted in the learning of behavior that was more suitable in future reoccurrences of the situation. Note that such newly learned behavior, although more useful, may not be adaptive. That is because, in terms of energy, the related benefits of consciousness may be less than its costs.

Despite the above example, this article will not attempt to show why consciousness is adaptive for humans. That’s because our vast complexity as human beings might lure us into the huge domain of the possible usefulness (or uselessness) of the various contents of human consciousness. For examples of sometimes-useful consciousness, consider feelings of pleasure while eating; and also consider ideas of virtue about abstaining from that kind of pleasure. The arguable value of such beliefs will not be explored.

The idea that consciousness was an ancient adaptation needs development to make it a testable theory. To contribute to that difficult task, here is how the following three basic ideas might be tested:

In his article, “How To Be Conscious” (in Philosophy Now 9), Roger Caldwell writes that “we have no criteria by which to identify at what point consciousness begins. Apes and dogs we assume are conscious, flowers and seaweed we assume are not, but what about snakes, fish, mosquitoes, amoebae?”

One possible piece of evidence for consciousness is the (aforementioned) rapid drinking by sheep and cows in stressful situations. It suggests that these animals drink quickly because they experience both their need for water and a potentially dangerous environment.

Expanding on the idea of the need for rapid drinking leads to the concept of deprivation which in turn leads to the idea of tests that deprive animals of things their bodies need. So if they experience the deprivation, they will have feelings that are unpleasant or painful. However, for an investigator to experiment with possible pain may be a difficult ethical move; it raises an issue that may be thorny albeit fruitful.

Another possibility for distinguishing between nonconscious animals and those that are conscious is the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep that scientists observe in people. Rapid eye movement during sleep is associated with dreaming, which is a variety of experiencing. Thus, creatures that have REM sleep are conscious. If we could get animals to sleep normally in an environment where we could detect the presence and absence of rapid eye motion, that could help us move down the animal-complexity scale and perhaps find the simplest conscious creatures, as they would have REM sleep.

It is suggested above that, other things equal, being conscious may require more energy than does being nonconscious. So consciousness could have a physical-world price of energy needed to sustain it. Start here with our own species. We know that when people are ill, they sleep more than normal—and sleep includes dreamless sleep, the long intervals in each normal day when people are nonconscious. Assume that someone devises a way of comparing energy used by humans during (nonconscious) dreamless sleep and during (conscious) REM dreaming sleep. Measurements showing that more energy is used during REM sleep than during non-REM sleep would provide verification that consciousness requires energy.

Consciousness can cause useful behavior. For example, in tough times, feelings of intense thirst and hunger would drive creatures to try harder to find water and food to sustain themselves. Apart from the scientific problems of developing evidence for this, depriving creatures of drink or food would (as mentioned above) raise ethical issues. Setting aside the latter here, let’s move to the sheep and cows that were mentioned above by Faw, who notes that it was found (by Derek Denton) that these animals can satisfy thirst in a few minutes by rapid drinks. Their satiation occurs long before the water is absorbed and changes the chemical imbalance that led to the drinking. This implies that it is the satisfaction of (conscious) thirst feelings that determines the amount of drinking. This has great evolutionary advantage: Rapidly getting in and out of vulnerable drinking areas.

There are scientists who doubt that consciousness is of Darwinian benefit to the creatures that have it. Some question the idea that—like a ghost causing a machine to move—immaterial-seeming consciousness can be the cause of material brain activity and subsequent behavior. As yet, it is unproven that consciousness has material effects. If it didn’t cause objective activity, consciousness would neither help nor hinder creatures in the material world. However, the objective activities that are our spoken and written words about consciousness disprove the notion that (conscious) ideas have no material consequences.

For another reason to doubt the consciousness is good for nothing hypothesis, consider the related counter-proposition: only neural brain activity (as we now understand it) can cause behavior. However, at present, those who study the brain don’t know enough about it to say that it is exclusively the material brain (apart from immaterial-seeming consciousness) that causes behavior. That we know relatively little about the brain is implied by the meager results of the quest for artificial intelligence. Computer scientist Peter Kassan, in a SKEPTIC 10 magazine article, notes that we have not succeeded in modeling the brain of any animal. His article notes that the “nervous system of a nematode (worm) . . . has been studied extensively for about 40 years. . . . [This worm] has just over three hundred neurons, and they’ve been studied exhaustively. But mapping is not the same as modeling. No one has created a computer model of this nervous system . . .”

A different kind of doubt (about the Darwinian benefit of consciousness) is offered by (aforementioned) psychologist David P. Barash 11: “Maybe consciousness hasn’t been an evolutionary development at all; maybe it is a non-adaptive byproduct of having large brains.” Here, the words “maybe it is a non-adaptive byproduct” suggest that although our (subjective) experiencing may indeed be the cause of (objective) behavior, there might not be any significant net benefit from that behavior. Presently, this idea cannot be shown to be wrong, although it certainly can be doubted.

Doubtless there are sizable shortcomings in current work on consciousness as causing useful behavior, and thus as a possible Darwinian adaptation. However, such deficiencies should not be unfairly magnified by unsupported claims that presently understood human brain activity (without help from consciousness) is sufficient as the cause of all behavior.

1 William H. Libaw, How We Got To Be Human: Subjective Minds with Objective Bodies, (Prometheus Books), 2000.

2 David P. Barash, Los Angeles Times April 2, 2006, “The consciousness puzzle.”

6 Bill Faw, “What We Know and What We Don’t Know About Consciousness Science, A Review of ASSC-9 [Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness-9] at Cal-Tech, June 24-27, 2005,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12, No. 7, 2005.

7 Benjamin Libet et al, “Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Sensory Experience.” Brain, 102, 1979.

8 Mary Osborn and Susan Blackmore, “Driving beyond consciousness.” Conference: Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson 2006.

9 Roger Caldwell, “How To Be Conscious,” Philosophy Now, Issue 54, Feb/Mar 06.

10 Peter Kassan, “A.I. Gone Awry: The Futile Quest for Artificial Intelligence.” SKEPTIC magazine, Volume 12, Number 2, 2006.

11 David P. Barash, Los Angeles Times April 2, 2006, “The consciousness puzzle.”

William H. Libaw is the author of How We Got To Be Human: Subjective Minds with Objective Bodies (2000, Prometheus Books), and of Painting in a World Transformed: How Modern Art Reflects Our Conflicting Responses to Science and Change (2005,McFarland & Company). Prior to his present work as a writer, he was an electronic design engineer. His designs include parts of an early version of our satellite navigation system, and devices that track stars in the daytime sky.