Emergent Minds

Rethinking What it Means to be Conscious

What even is consciousness anyway?

If I could answer that definitively, I’d be a very rich man.

But definitive or not, I certainly have ideas about it—or at least what it might be. Today I’d like to suggest a perhaps controversial view. A panpsychist interpretation of consciousness that does not seek to limit consciousness to the familiar form we experience as humans. Rather a much broader interpretation that allows for scalable levels of complexity in consciousness, from the absolute most complex, something akin to God, to the absolute most minimal of proto-consciousness. Further, I’d like to suggest a continuum that these hierarchies of consciousness exist in, such that we might be able to measure levels of consciousness. Finally, I’ll suggest consciousness might be something all together different than our subjective experience may suggest.

But let’s start with the familiar. Let’s start with ourselves.

It is no doubt one of the great mysteries of life how our lived experience of consciousness comes to be. We’ve worked out it has something to do with the brain at least. We even appear to have a strong candidate for a specific mechanism by which it may emerge in the form of “Orchestrated Objective Reduction,” a proposal put forward by renowned physicist Roger Penrose which suggests that quantum phenomena happening in a semi-controlled manner within structures called “microtubules” in brain cells are responsible for consciousness. So maybe that’s it then? Case closed. We’re conscious. Other animals with brains are conscious. And it’s just Orchestrated Objective Reduction all the way down.

But that’s hardly a satisfying answer is it? It doesn’t really tell us why we have consciousness. Nor does it tell us anything about the subjective experience of being conscious. Nor does it tell us anything about the relation between human consciousness, and let’s say a dog’s consciousness. Are they one and the same? Are they different experiences somehow? Well, surely they must be, right? Our senses are not the same, our intelligence is not the same, and thus our experiences must not be the same. Similar in some ways, sure, but not the same.

So where’s the difference? Is it just the size of our brains? The number of microtubules in the process of Objective Orchestrated Reduction? Dolphins have about the same brain to body size as humans. They are of course famously smart among the animal kingdom, but the same? It would not appear so.

But perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps we should look at another kind of animal all together. One that isn’t particularly strong on brains, and yet one that has a very sophisticated kind of intelligence. A different form of consciousness entirely. Let’s talk about ants.

Are ants conscious? Well, they have brains. Pitifully tiny brains, but brains nonetheless. And individually, they appear about as intelligent as their tiny brains might suggest. They’re not very smart. But ants do not go it alone. Ants form colonies. And ant colonies are shockingly intelligent.

Ant colonies use complex pheromone signals to guide the individual unintelligent ants into very intelligent coordinated behavior. They can send our foraging parties and quickly organize into efficient resource extraction lines. They can assign different jobs to individual ants to ensure the colony is covering all its bases. They can construct complex tunnel networks without destabilizing the integrity of the structure. They can efficiently distribute food and resources among themselves. They can also band together in dangerous situations to fight off invaders. They can even band together to fight off natural disasters! Some species of ant will come together in a giant ball acting as a raft in flood waters such that the colony survives, even if some ants might drown. Some species even farm other insects. You get the idea.

An ant is stupid, but an ant colony is smart. Does that mean that if an ant is conscious, an ant colony is more conscious? If so, it’s quite curious considering that the ant colony does not have a brain. There is no Orchestrated Objective Reduction telling the ant colony what to do. Any yet the colony appears to display a higher level of consciousness than any of the individual ants.

The careful observer might, however, notice that the behavior of the ants is actually quite like the behavior of our cells. Individually, our cells are not intelligent. We don’t even typically think of them as conscious. Like the ants their behavior is governed by signals. For cells it is neurotransmitters. For the ants, pheromones. But the underlying mechanism is analogous. A complex system of networked signals directs the unintelligent life form such that intelligent behavior emerges. Intelligence, and perhaps consciousness, is an emergent phenomena of complex networks.

And this is not a novel observation. Emergence is a core component of systems theory stating that complex behaviors or properties arise from the simpler components of a system. In other words, in a sufficiently complex network, novel or unexpected patterns or behaviors emerge that are not predictable from a base understanding of the underlying parts. The system has properties unique to any of its components.

So perhaps this is the actual nature of consciousness. An emergent phenomena that comes about from the complex network of cells in our brains. It also suggests that consciousness could be layered. If the individual ant is conscious, by virtue of having a brain, that consciousness is experientially only aware of itself, and yet it participates in a higher order consciousness in the form of the ant colony, ignorant of the higher order consciousness it participates in.

If this is true, it would suggest any sufficiently complex system could take on a kind of consciousness, whether it has a brain or not, as with our ant colony. If it is true of ants, why would it not be true of people? Let’s test that theory. Let’s consider everyone’s favorite thing in the world—bureaucracies.

Any bureaucracy is going to be a network of human individuals operating with each other through the bureaucratic network. Signals are sent across departments or nodes with predictable patterns. People make requests, submit forms, forms get stamped, approvals or denials take place, and ultimately the bureaucracy takes some kind of action. Independent of any one individual the procedural network established by the system’s rules receives an input stimulus, and generates a response. It is a decision making engine without any single point of failure.

But importantly, there is nothing to say that the bureaucracy must be limited to produce desirable, or even its initially intended outcomes. A bureaucracy, like any life form, is going to look to grow and expand. It is going to find an edge case where procedure is not clearly defined and define it. It thus gradually broadens the scope of its own power, as well as its size, and it will generally find a way to meddle. The more it meddles, the more things it gets to decide, the stronger and more entrenched it becomes. This is how you can get unintended outcomes.

Imagine a bureaucracy intended to facilitate the safe construction of new houses. There’s a housing crisis, we need lots of new houses after all. But the bureaucracy will always find a reason to not approve a new building plan. You need to revise X. You need to get Y permit. You need to hire one of our affiliated inspectors to check Z. An organization meant to facilitate the the expansion of housing instead slows it down or even stops it outright. This is because the bureaucracy has its own agenda to expand and entrench itself, regardless of whether that expansion comes at the expense of its core function or not. The system has a will of its own. It is not obliged to excel in its originally intended objectives to sustain itself.

If you think on it I am sure you will find specific bureaucracies that fit this pattern. I for one would argue every Liberal Democracy’s government in the present day is no longer fit for purpose by means of this process, but let’s save that more explicitly political discussion for another time. For now, we need only to understand that the bureaucracy has its own autonomous decision making apparatus, its own consciousness if you will, borne from the complex network of its internal structures. We are to the bureaucracy as our cells are to us, or as the ant is to the ant colony. Mere components of a higher order consciousness born from a human to human network. And like the ant, we need not be experientially aware of the higher order consciousness’ will to fulfill its orders.

So perhaps no brain is needed at all to achieve consciousness. Merely some form of sufficiently complex network is all it takes. And we are aware of the conscious experience of being a human. In other words, we are aware of the experience of consciousness at precisely our level of consciousness. But at a sufficiently higher order, or lower order, we do not have a direct experience of “being” at that level of network. The experience becomes unrelatable to us.

So if consciousness is an emergent property of networks, and larger networks, or even networks of sub-networks produce higher order consciousness, then what is the largest possible network? Surely this would produce the highest order of consciousness, right?

Well, would it not be the entire universe?

I propose two complementary ways of assessing this. Let’s call them “The Cosmic Network” and “The Life Network.” Let’s start with “The Cosmic Network.”

In this view, the universe itself is a highly complex network between all matter in the universe governed by the laws of physics. On this cosmic scale, we’re not thinking so much about neurotransmitters or the properties of atomic charges. No, on this scale the analogous role of an atom might be assigned to the solar system itself, with the sun acting like a nucleus and the planets its electron orbitals. At this scale gravity appears to be the primary force governing this network. Maybe signals take the form of asteroids being whipped out into the cosmos by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, to subtly affect the orbits of distant celestial bodies as they pass by.

For “The Cosmic Network” to do anything it would take an absurd length of time. Well beyond the scale of a human life, or even the entire span of humanity itself. But the universe does appear to have a trend towards a kind of order. Hot spots of relatively dense activity contrasted by desolate stretches of nothing gradually begin to form into galactic filaments—structures that look bizarrely similar to networks of brain cells. Could these not be the making of a ludicrously complex, slow moving network that, like other networks, has an associated emergent intelligent consciousness?

After all, time perception scales inversely with size. An elephant’s perception of time is slower than that of a fly. An intelligence formed of a literal universe spanning network would likely be entirely unbothered if it takes a few millennia to conjure a thought. In this we achieve true panpsychism. Every piece of matter unified in the grandest possible network, the complex interactions within generating the most complex consciousness.

But maybe this is unconvincing. It’s too alien. It assigns conscious properties to too much inorganic material to warrant a concession. Ok, I hear you. Let’s consider “The Life Network” instead.

I think most of us would agree that there was no life as we would recognize it anywhere in the universe as it began. Just star dust scattered across the cosmos in a violent explosion that slowly formed into the stars, planets, and other celestial bodies we know and love today. Nothing whatsoever but inorganic material. In other words, nothing containing consciousness as we would recognize it.

But then, somewhere in the primordial soup on planet Earth something miraculous happened. The first life emerged. A self-replicating chemical reaction that gradually grew in complexity and sophistication. From amino acids and proteins to pre-cellular structures like mitochondria. Then the first single celled organisms. Eventually multi-cellular organisms. Over a long evolutionary process we start to get the plants and animals we know today, including human beings themselves. Human beings who we all agree are very much so experiencing consciousness.

What this implies is that inorganic material in the universe is capable of autonomously rearranging itself into sufficiently complex networks such that our lived experience of consciousness arises. Further that this is an ongoing process wherein more and more inorganic matter is converted into conscious matter. At the time of the first cell the amount of “living” matter was basically nothing compared to today. Biomass continues to grow. Even if humans are the only conscious animal, as the human population grows, so too does the amount of matter experiencing consciousness. If we spread across the stars, would more and more of the universe not be rearranged into a state of consciousness?

Is it really so outrageous to then say that the universe rearranges itself such that consciousness emerges? We must concede it’s happened at least once already. If this happens at the microcosm with our bodies, why not at the macrocosm with the universe itself as God’s body (for what else could this highest order consciousness be but a conception of God)?

But this still feels unsatisfying. What is consciousness? We’ve defined it as an emergent property of complex networks, the more complex the network, the higher the consciousness. But at its most fundamental, what actually is it?

Well, let’s invert the analysis. If consciousness is a product of the interactions in complex systems, and the more complex the system, the higher the form of consciousness, would that not mean that the smallest unit of consciousness would be the product of the interactions in the smallest possible network? The least complex system? That would be the interactions between two objects, no? Very small objects. Perhaps quarks?

Interestingly quarks do have a property reminiscent of this. Quarks can be entangled such that if we know the spin of one quark (up or down), we know the spin of the other, entangled, quark (the opposite). Perhaps this is the most basic unit of consciousness in the universe. The smallest, most primitive form of “proto-consciousness.” If we were to measure consciousness in units, perhaps this would be 1. I propose “1 noo” if you will.

We could then measure consciousness as a function of the complexity of all interactions in a linked network. As more and more elements and variables are added to the network, its complexity skyrockets exponentially. Suffice to say we won’t be measuring human consciousness in anything less than “Giganoos.”

But what does that even mean? To describe the entanglement of two quarks as a possible baseline for consciousness seems kind of absurd. Surely the quark pair does not have an experience of being like our own. They are not making decisions. Or maybe they are. Maybe there is a decision being made there. Up or down. Perhaps that is consciousness at the bottom. Perhaps that’s where you’ll find the hand of God.

But if you’d rather not speculate at Divinity here, I do have an alternative explanation, though I confess it does make me a bit uncomfortable. If what consciousness fundamentally is is the product of networked interactions, might we understand these interactions not as “decisions” but as “computations.” In other words, it is not that the quark decides to be up or be down, but rather the universe calculates which it is at the moment of observation.

Consciousness would therefore be the computation of all relevant interactions that governs the behavioral outcome of that system in response to a stimulus. The points of interaction within a network functioning like a behavior determining algorithm. A stimulus goes in, that system computes a response based on the governing laws of the network, and a behavior is elicited.

Thus if we scale up to something not quite as small as a quark pair, but still too small for us to recognize as conscious in the conventional sense, we can illustrate consciousness as a computation of how things shall behave. For example a raindrop hitting the soil. A water molecule in the droplet comes into contact with a nitrogen atom in the soil. This interaction already is several orders of magnitude more complex than our quark pair. We’re dealing with “Hectonoos” now. But it would not feel right to describe this interaction has having any choice. The water does not decide how it will interact with the nitrogen. But the universe will compute exactly how this very limited network shall operate.

Maybe that’s all consciousness is in the end? The computation of an outrageously complicated algorithm borne from the unfathomably dense network contained within ourselves, that ultimately determines how that network will behave and act.

This understanding of consciousness covers us from the lowest network of two quark pairs, up to humans (with our consciousness being that which governs our actions), and even up to the entirety of the cosmos itself. Perhaps the only surprising thing here is that computation is experiential. We “feel” this computation being perpetually calculated.

But maybe everything has this “experiential feeling.” Proportional to the overall complexity of the network in question, but experienced nonetheless. This would imply the universe is always experiencing everything about itself. From the micro to the macro the universe is experiencing being through computation of all interaction and flux.

Maybe it’s not unreasonable to imagine the hand of God computing up and down for our quark pair. Maybe this is the root of experience. The bridge between material reality and the metaphysical. Our bodies regulate the up and down spin of each quark that makes up the network of our body and this is the essence of experience. That’s not completely out of line with “Orchestrated Objective Reduction,” which suggests our microtubules are stacking the deck to manipulate sustained quantum phenomena. It’s that “free will” to go up or down replicated uncountably which in concerto brings out the essence of the individual.

And so it goes with the larger scale meta-consciousnesses. The bureaucracy made of our combined neural networks and an overlaid logical structure is experienced through the combined consciousness of all that work within it. So too with universe, experiencing being at its most fundamental and most interconnected scales simultaneously.

And does this not align with the teachings of the mystics? That we are the universe, or Divinity, experiencing itself? Would it really be so strange that there would be a unique experience of being at both lower and higher levels of being? God’s experience of being quark, of being ant, of being ant colony, of being man, of being the Department of Motor Vehicles, of being everything all at once?

Perhaps then this is the essence of consciousness. God’s computed behavior for any networked system, and the accompanying experience of being.

In this way, all of being is part of the same underlying phenomena. A tapestry of conscious experience of being woven across the entire cosmos. One can zoom in and experience the micro, the nuances of the individual fibers, or zoom out to experience a larger section of the tapestry, observing a localized pattern of threads. One can even zoom out all the way, and experience the full mosaic of being itself.

Consciousness then is not a unique phenomenon to man, or animal, but rather is the computed experience of being at any level of complexity. And in this moment we happen to be experiencing the level that corresponds to a human experience. But we should not mistake this for the entirety of being. This is but one level, with other levels both above and below, all interconnected in the grandest network of them all.