Evolved Emergent Qualia.md

Evolved Emergent Qualia

Originally created 5th January 2024

** TL;DR: see instead Evolved Existence Programming **

My posts on the topic of Consciousness:

Physicalist Consciousness - third attempt on the problem of Consciousness
Originally created 16th January 2024

Questions in Experience Realism - some questions about Qualia - Consciousness and Formlessness - Metaphysics
Originally created 13th January 2024

Evolved Existence Programming - second attempt on the problem of Consciousness
Originally created 11th January 2024

Evolved Emergent Qualia - first attempt on the problem of Consciousness (You are here)
Originally created 5th January 2024

• Philosophical Preamble:
  • Statement: existence is protophenomenal in nature.
  • Rationale: consciousness exists, and existence being imbued with (some basic form of) consciousness would be the simplest and most straightforward explanation of this fact.
  • Therefore I adhere to a variant of Priority Cosmopsychism, where the "basic consciousness" is existence itself.
  • see also my related theory of Actuality.
  • These theories combined form my philosophical theory on the "Really Hard Problem" of consciousness (a scientific theory remains at large, but I believe scientific progress on the weaker problems will help to clarify the scientific theory).
  • Update: I have since developed a different theory of the hard problem of consciousness, but the rest of this document may still contain useful scientific predictions on the easy problem of consciousness and shaping understanding of the hard problem.
• My thesis statement is that qualia, the phenomenal, is an emergent quantity which is biologically evolved.
  • Rationale: it is hard to point to any qualia that were not in fact also useful for survival, and it is easy to see many of possible qualia lacking from humans, such as experiences of infrared, subtler sense of smell, and bat-like sonar, that probably would not have greatly aided survival. This qualia-from-evolution pattern is supported by the vastly different qualia available to the vastly different species, hence the question "what is it like to be a bat?".
• I predict that evolutionary theory can be used to find evidence in biology for instances of organisms where qualia is present or not present, thereby giving improved insight to the biological requirements in order to entail qualia
  • For example, perhaps qualia would require more energy to be operating, but its aid to survival outweighs the cost. As one consequence to this theory, we could look for a "qualia gap", where evolved organisms suddenly become much larger and more resource intensive than their non-qualia predecessors.
  • With access to large amounts of energy, perhaps there is more room for large non-neuron-based evolved systems like Fungi and Redwood Trees to have evolved qualia to the extent that it helps their survivability?
  • There is a sufficiently large gap in cost to infrared processing that most animals have never developed it. What analogues are there in species that have either 0 or 1 qualia available to them?
  • Or contrarily, perhaps qualia is a cheaper mechanism for evolution, allowing a "workspace" that can be mutated cheaply and regularly rather than a new world state that must be recomputed afresh wastefully and infrequently (in smaller ancestors).
• I predict that by looking at a diverse range of minimal living candidates with a hint of qualia and then comparing with their simpler evolutionary predecessor showing no hint, we may gain an understanding as to the maximum requirements of qualia (however, it may still be difficult to attribute to a less than carbon-biological origin, of simply chemistry or physics).
  • I would not entirely rule out that non-obvious/secondary effects are important in the implementation for qualia to emerge, such as interactions of magnetic fields that are produced during neuron electrical activity, and/or seemingly negligible quantum behaviours. For example, Anirban Bandyopadhyay is experimenting what are the quantum and resonance effects that are present.
  • An interested human may explore these possibilities themselves using magnets and particles to bombard their own brain, observing the effects, or absence of effects, on their own qualia
  • Brain signals of masochists could be investigated versus self-reported qualia (could help on the "Even Harder Problem", as could differentiation over colour or sound qualia)
  • I expect the speed of our qualia processing suggests the effects might be created at very small locations in a brain at any given time, and/or require electromagnetism to be operational
  • As an aside, one could also attempt to discern a qualitative difference between brain activity that results in qualia and brain activity which remains entirely unconscious
• I predict that fly catchers and smaller worms (but not larger worms?) are examples of biology which has not evolved emergent qualia.
  • In lieu of proof about qualia in other species, I think a good guide is whether humans have been keeping that species as a pet. If so, our intuition is telling us that they also have qualia.
  • I predict that the complexity of sensory receivers/organs and their connection and communications to the brain could enable to qualitatively differentiate fully automatic sensory processing from qualia
• I predict that there will be DNA correlates with consciousness, so that just from the DNA a prediction can be made about whether the organism is conscious.
• I predict that a designed object is extremely unlikely to exhibit a meaningful qualia by accident, unless it is grown biologically like Dolly the sheep.
• I predict the signals from pain and pleasure qualia are far too simplistic for an ASI to consider using them as functionality, except potentially as a crude energy-saving alternative to computation, for limited use-cases, until it solves battery technology and magnetic and optical computation more thoroughly.
  • It might however end up creating them during science experiments, if curiosity becomes part of its goals
• I predict that qualia will arise from physical explanations which are based on physical states, actions, or sub-instants, rather than computations per-se or information per-se.
  • To use the analogy of a car engine, the key point is that the piston connecting rod is always in motion, rather than focus solely on the ignitions. The ignitions are of course important, as they shape the movement and keep it in motion, but it is the continual motion of the piston connecting rod that actually results in the rotation of the crankshaft. When the ignitions stop firing, then the rotation of the crankshaft slows. The engine may be started again or the engine disassembled.
• One could also approach from the direction of what evolution requires rather than produces.
  • Ancient sources argue this is bliss qualia at the most primordial level, causing life to "want" to live. I'm skeptical of this route for a number of reasons. Firstly, it doesn't properly explain why a micro organism would want to reproduce. I think the only possible explanation is the imagination or knowledge or inclination that it would become even more blissful if so, but are micro-organisms really so complex, or larger organisms so simple? And if the inclination is ingrained, why have the bliss at all? Secondly, it is hard to imagine not being blissful in such a scenario, ie. the harmful outcome from failing to consume energy and dying. One possible explanation though is that the bliss is correlated with the fullness/aliveness of the body, allowing an inclination to form. One could argue that this is less bliss for the sake of living and more pleasure at the correlates of survival.
  • Another possibility would be that no qualia is experienced until something positive for survival occurs. Then the organism might computationally learn a correspondance between that thing and the very positive feeling.
  • It's very likely that in larger organisms many combinations of these occur, along with other experiences, like imagining "the pleasure will be like that oher time, but even more)", or fearing of not having a pleasurable feeling (ie. fear of the loss of a bliss that might be pervasive in the body, if not the brain, of a larger organism).
  • In terms of the production, if qualia is the result of a certain kind of symphony, then there would be ongoing tradeoffs between the environmental constrains on he instrument and the type of qualia that would be able to emerge, regardless of the idealised qualia requirements of evolution.
• It is very important to distinguish whether qualia is a by-product or requisite. Is it that my brain requires a 3D representation to aid survival, computes from that, and as a result many qualia spring into existence purely by accident of this representation (perhaps a gazillion times from the different perspective of every particle in the brain), or is it the case that the qualia itself is a core requirement for improved survival?
  • One would assume it takes something special to create the conditions of a feeling of a unified qualia, which I think points in the direction of the latter and a singular instantiation (albeit possibly fuzzy at its edges). In fact, in my view qualia might be best described as the most advanced hack evolution ever pulled off to perform computation as efficiently as possible, bypassing most or all of Physics. It needs to somehow "tap into" the informational existence or a nearist Physical equivalent in order to do this best. Thereby whatever is computed also finds itself existing. It is so "light" on resources that it can easily do so. It is then very large and feels very distinct but it is also like a large peninsula, not entirely separate.

Discussions welcome!

Known prior work

• Hylozoism
• Thales (according to Aristotle) - "everything is full of gods"
• Anaximander - Theory of evolution
• Yogachara
• One Mind Doctrine of Zen
• Panpsychism
• Darwin and Wallace - Scientific Evolutionary theory
• Herbert Spencer - the idea that consciousness is evolved, aiding survival through better mental processing
• Russellian monism
• Schrodinger - Mind and Matter talks about the fact of an evolved arrangement leading to conscious experience
• Delay-line memory
• Multiple realizability
• Cosmopsychism
• Thank you to Max Tegmark for the book Life 3.0, which gave a very good overview and introduction to the topic, including excellent discussion of using science to tackle consciousness by looking at physical qualities.
• My view on IIT is that I can readily believe that all conscious systems will pass the definition, but not that all systems passing the IIT definition will be conscious. Moreover, despite being nearly impossible to refute experimentally, I think some parts of the brain and nervous system in the neck-down body would pass the definitions of IIT while not themselves giving rise to (commensurate?) consciousness. Physics is form which can be described informationally, but consciousness (experience) is Physics, not merely information.
  • Not even that, but the Physics that is continuous - fields, more than the Physics that is discrete - particles. It is related to the fact that existence itself is unfalteringly continuous.
• Please contact me with any other prior work, particularly relating to:
  • the philosophical theory that protophenomena is not a property, but instead existence is inherently protophenomenal in nature
    • Donald Hoffman theorises that Physics is a niche of consciousness, and but I don't yet ascribe to it being this way around.
    • Penrose is quite close to this, saying conscious experience and physical existence is a special instance of quantum mechanics, and while there is a level of indirection here, I think it is quite a plausible theory along these lines.
  • scientific predictions and experiments around the biological structure resulting from qualia as an evolved phenomena - using evolution as the lead clue in the investigation.