In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, Patrick House writes:
Generally, though not in every case, each of the nineteen “ways” in this book promotes the idea that the brain evolved for, is itself, and will always be dedicated to movement. The best reason to start there is the simple, physical, and verifiable fact that a human brain’s only outputs are the muscles it connects to, whether the small ones that dart the eyes back and forth or the lumbering thigh muscles that kick-start a walk. No matter what goes into a brain, only movement ever comes out.
In I of the Vortex, Rodolfo Llinás writes about the "sea squirt":
House and Llinás say the brain is for movement, and House that's the only output the brain has.The adult form of this creature is sessile, rooted by its pedicle to a stable object in the sea. The sea squirt carries out two basic functions in its life: it feeds by filtering seawater, and it reproduces by budding. The larval form is briefly free-swimming (usually a day or less) and is equipped with a brainlike ganglion containing approximately 300 cells. This primitive nervous system receives sensory information about the surrounding environment through a statocyst (organ of balance), a rudimentary, light-sensitive patch of skin, and a notochord (primitive spinal cord). These features allow this tadpole-like creature to handle the vicissitudes of the ever-changing world within which it swims. Upon finding a suitable substrate the larva proceeds to bury its head into the selected location and becomes sessile once again. Once reattached to a stationary object the larva absorbs—literally digests—most of its own brain, including its notochord. It also digests its tail and tail musculature, thereupon regressing to the rather primitive adult stage: sessile and lacking a true nervous system other than that required for activation of the simple filtering activity. The lesson here is quite clear: the evolutionary development of a nervous system is an exclusive property of actively moving creatures.
In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write:
The first mind Ogas and Gaddam discuss is that of the archaea. A mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements: a sensor and a doer. The simplest hypothetical mind would have one sensor and one doer. Apparently, we are not aware of such a thing on the planet. The simplest mind we are aware of is the archaea. The archaea has what they call a molecule mind:A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.
"All the thinking elements in molecule minds consist of individually identifiable molecules."
Archaea has two sensors and two doers. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about this, and detail isn't important for my point. The general idea is that a protein called rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of events that leads to the archaea's archaella (flagella) moving, which moves the archaea. A little more detail is found starting at 3:00 of this video.
The archaella do not move because of the impact of the photons. Nor do they move because of a brute-force chain reaction, like dominos simply banging into each other. The archaella move because a series of chemical reactions carries the information that light with certain characteristics is in a certain direction. And that information directs the archaea, making it more likely to survive.
The position of Ogas and Gaddam is that this activity is thinking. Even at the most rudimentary level. Even before there is a brain.
Not everyone agrees, and it's difficult to argue with them with confidence. What an archaea does seems too mechanical to be called thinking. The series of chemical reactions is different than a brute-force chain reaction, but it's no less physical. Each chemical reaction in the series is still a physical, cause and effect event. I think we need more than this to have thinking.
Among the other creatures/minds Ogas and Gaddam discuss is the roundworm. (They say the flatworm has the first "honest-to-goodness brain", but Eric Cassell and Steven Flavell say the roundworm has a brain.) Roundworm has a new thinking element, to help out its sensors and doers (now sensory neurons and motor neurons). These are neurons that the authors call thinkers, and are usually called interneurons. It has two interneurons: one activates the motor neurons that move the roundworm forward, and the other activates the motor neurons that move the roundworm backward. These interneurons are also connected to each other, and inhibit each other. If food is sensed ahead, the forward interneuron starts its motor neurons, and inhibits the backward interneuron. If poison is sensed ahead, the backward interneuron starts its motor neurons, and inhibits the forward interneuron. The stronger the signal one interneuron receives, the stronger it inhibits the other.
The roundworm is choosing between options. It is making decisions. Is this sufficient to be considered thinking?
I don't think so. Although it's much more complicated than what takes place in the archaea, it's still just physical, cause and effect events, and we can follow the physical events from the sensory input to the movement of the roundworm.
But if brain activity that makes decisions so the entity moves in ways that benefit it is not thinking, then what is thinking?
How about brain activity that does not move the entity in ways that benefit it?
It seems strange to think that thinking, as I have defined it, which is, arguably, the most important thing the brain does, and moving the entity, which is what the brain did when it first appeared, what it came to do better as it evolved, and what it exclusively does in at least the case of the sea squirt, are extremely different things.
Bach and Beethoven are my favorite composers. They are extremely different. I could go on for a long time comparing and contrasting them; examining the structure of their pieces; looking at chord progressions; comparing how they write fugues; who they worked for and the historical events of their times; on and on. In short, thinking about them, but not turning sensory input into action.
1 + 1 = 2 is a thought that doesn't have anything to do with turning sensory input into action.
Could thinking be the activity in the brain that has no physical output? Activity that is not physical stimulus and response/cause and effect.
What, exactly, does that mean? How does it work? Antonio Damasio speaks often of it. In Descarte's Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, he says:
And here are two quotes from Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious:As organisms acquired greater complexity, "brain-caused" actions required more intermediate processing. Other neurons were interpolated between the stimulus neuron and the response neuron, and varied parallel circuits were thus set up, but it did not follow that the organism with that more complicated brain necessarily had a mind. Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought. (The images are not solely visual; there are also "sound images," "olfactory images," and so on.)
Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. And yet living organisms sensed others like them and sensed their environments. By sensing I mean the detection of a “presence”—of another whole organism, of a molecule located on the surface of another organism or of a molecule secreted by another organism. Sensing is not perceiving, and it is not constructing a “pattern” based on something else to create a “representation” of that something else and produce an “image” in mind. On the other hand, sensing is the most elementary variety of cognition.
As we discuss life and the kinds of intelligent management that different species rely on, it becomes clear that we need to identify the menu of specific and distinct strategies available to those creatures and give names to the functional steps they constitute. Sensing (detecting) is most basic, and I believe it is present in all living forms. Minding is next. It requires a nervous system and the creation of representations and images, the critical component of minds. Mental images flow relentlessly in time and are infinitely open to manipulation so as to yield novel images.
- the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought.
- constructing a “pattern” based on something else to create a “representation” of that something else and produce an “image” in mind.
- the creation of representations and images, the critical component of minds.
Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, by Antonio Damasio.
The first of those questions concerns intelligences and minds. We know that the most numerous living organisms on earth are unicellular, such as bacteria. Are they intelligent? Indeed they are, remarkably so. Do they have minds? No, they do not, I believe, and neither do they have consciousness. They are autonomous creatures; they clearly have a form of “cognition” relative to their environment, and yet, instead of depending on minds and consciousness, they rely on non-explicit competences—based on molecular and sub-molecular processes—that govern their lives efficiently according to the dictates of homeostasis.
Life sailed forth without words or thoughts, without feelings or reasons, devoid of minds or consciousness. And yet living organisms sensed others like them and sensed their environments. By sensing I mean the detection of a “presence”—of another whole organism, of a molecule located on the surface of another organism or of a molecule secreted by another organism. Sensing is not perceiving, and it is not constructing a “pattern” based on something else to create a “representation” of that something else and produce an “image” in mind. On the other hand, sensing is the most elementary variety of cognition.
As we discuss life and the kinds of intelligent management that different species rely on, it becomes clear that we need to identify the menu of specific and distinct strategies available to those creatures and give names to the functional steps they constitute. Sensing (detecting) is most basic, and I believe it is present in all living forms. Minding is next. It requires a nervous system and the creation of representations and images, the critical component of minds. Mental images flow relentlessly in time and are infinitely open to manipulation so as to yield novel images.
The mind is the thinking. If no thinking is taking place, there is no mind. In humans, when in dreamless sleep, or under general anesthesia, or dead, the brain is still present, but there is no thinking. There is no mind.
A bunch of motionless people on a court with a basketball is not a basketball game. The potential is there. Players, ball, and court means a game can take place. A brain means thinking can take place.
The basketball game is nothing more or less than the passing, shooting, dribbling, time outs, etc. I think the mind is nothing more or less than the thinking.
We don’t say there’s a basketball game separate from those activities. I say there isn’t a mind separate from the thinking.
There is no basketball game that’s inactive. There’s either shooting, passing, dribbling, etc., taking place, or there isn’t. I say there is no mind that’s inactive. There’s either thinking taking place, or there isn’t.
What does an inactive mind mean? When there is no thinking, what is present that we could call a mind?
In the roundworm, we have a creature that came into existence through the processing of information that is now processing information about two different things in the environmental, is judging how good or bad those things are, comparing their merits against each other, and acting on the decision it comes to. That's a good deal of information processing, in just a roundworm.
If all of this, and more, right on up to us, is nothing more than the physical properties and processes we know from our senses and sciences, then there is no reason for any process or creature to be subjectively experiencing what is happening, or its own existence. Nothing described suggests such a thing. There is no reason to think conscious beings constructed of different materials than us would examine us, and understand that we are conscious. No neuron, or neurotransmitter, or sense, or storage system, or any other thing or process known to our sciences, suggests it.
But if consciousness is fundamental, and if information processing unites groups of particles into a conscious unit, then, as life grows more and more complex, the conscious unit is experiencing greater and greater complexity.
The more a living thing, that is, a thing built from an information processing system, processes information with its mind, the more information processing it subjectively experiences.
How many steps are between the sensor and doer in an information processing system? How does the nature of the information in an information processing system change between the sensor and the doer? How many information processing systems does an entity have? How do the information processing systems within an entity interact?
The consciousness within each particle of its mind experiences what is happening to it. And, as the different parts of the body function as one unit - the body - all of the thinking elements function as one mind, and all of the consciousness functions as one consciousness.