Peter Godfrey-Smith on the Evolution of Consciousness in Other Minds

Peter Godfrey-Smith, of the City University of New York and the University of Sydney, is one of my favourite philosophers. His work in the philosophy of biology, particularly on the problem of biological individuality and on the evolution of consciousness, is very interesting and, I think, important. I got into his work while doing a unit at university on exactly that subject, and reading his take on the first of the two problems mentioned above. I found myself experiencing tremendous admiration for his bipartite schema for the determination of biological individuality and his ingenious cubic diagram (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/06/the-problem-of-individuals-and-species.html). Anyhow, I just finished his book Other Minds, a meditation on the cognitive faculties of octopus and cuttlefish species, particularly as they illuminate issues generally in the evolution of intelligence and consciousness (but also because this stuff is damn fascinating in its own right). It's a very elegantly written and very compelling and insightful book. I'm not going to properly review it, because I don't properly review books (I loathe summarising things). I just want to highlight a couple of his observations and thoughts from the section on "consciousness", which, incidentally, is a very good section, with some genuinely original thoughts raised in defence of a 'gradualist' position on the evolution of consciousness, and, by extension, a 'continuous' position on consciousness itself (as opposed to boring David Chalmers-type 'consciousness-is-a-special-mystery-essence' BS.)

The first observation I want to mention is a rather simple evolutionary insight but, I think, extremely important, and highly underappreciated. It goes as follows: since mobile animals (as opposed to plants, or microscopic creatures, or most insects) affect the world they interact with in a very salient way - at the very least, by moving their body, significantly alter the scene coming in through their perceptual systems - they absolutely 100% need to somehow model what 'they' are doing to change things around them, as opposed to what other creatures are doing, or what is happening due to non-organismal forces like currents in the ocean, the wind, etc. This attribute of having some kind of model of the self, or at least some kind of 'awareness' of actions taken, must, therefore, be very ancient. The nervous systems of fish in the Cambrian explosion probably included some mechanisms that transmitted motor information to other parts of the system. Another interesting thought Godfrey-Smith raises is that acting abnormally in response to negative stimulus - like tightening up or moving rapidly in a certain direction, or producing a sound - and avoiding sources of pain, is a definite sign of this ability, and a definite sign of feeling pain or experiencing suffering of some kind. And, in this connection, he points out that ants do not act any different when they are severely damaged; ants still try to drag themselves around even when their abdomens are squished, as if nothing has happened at all.

A more subtle theory he proposes on this topic is that organisms that have evolved to be curious in the sense that they have evolved to be versatile foragers, looking for different food at different times or in different places, and to take advantage of resources (e.g. both habitation and food resources),in new environments - a category which does seem to encompass both us and the octopi, along perhaps with our chimp cousins and definitely our hominin ancestors - may possess a greater degree of consciousness because such creatures have to rely heavily on highly integrated thinking, having to really take in all aspects of their environment and solve problems using knowledge from different areas of the brain. It's hard to connect this directly to 'subjectivity', but of course the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness is a very popular one, and something seems right about it (more on this in a second).

He also suggests - extremely plausibly, as I see it - that humans may have a uniquely strong sense of subjectivity because of internal language, and the ability it probably enables for meta-thinking, thinking about one's thoughts and reflecting on one's mental states. In his nod to the integrated information/workspace theory of consciousness, he hypothesises that language may also be a major tool in helping the mind bring together information coming from different modules (strangely enough, he and I share this theory (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/an-essay-on-mysteries-of-mind.html (I want to be clear that I have been convinced since I wrote this that the Chomsky-Berwick hypothesis on the origin of language is very likely quite significantly wrong)) and we both think that there may be evidence for this from child psychology research by the likes of Elizabeth Spelke (actually, I can't remember if he cites Spelke but he mentions some child psychology research)). Fascinatingly, he hypothesises that it might be reasonable to think of Kahneman and Tversky's category of "System 2 Thinking" as linguistic thinking, thinking which brings all our knowledge to one 'workspace' and allows us to slow down and process things symbolically. And he suggests also that it is when that internal language is more muted that one is less conscious, i.e. one is less conscious when that 'voice' is switched off. This last bit does accord with my own experience, I think, when I reflect. And surely it is no coincidence that meditation-boosters talk of the feeling of being 'freed of the self' by eliminating that incessant interior monologue.

So pain and some kind of monitoring of oneself as an agent comes inevitably with being a certain-sized creature acting in the world (Godfrey-Smith namedrops Dewey in relation to this stuff, which I like, because Dewey is super cool), but maybe only humans have that real special sort of awareness, because that comes with language. Cool stuff.

Also I agree with Godfrey-Smith's claim in this book that intelligence isn't one thing, and that there is no such thing as General Intelligence with a capital G and I (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/12/a-rambling-essay-called-notion-of.html).