Metaconsciousness

god3Sci provided some interesting links in his comment on the previous post, one a lecture by Raymond Tallis. Tallis offers some comfort to theists who have difficulty explaining how or why an eternal creator God should be making one-off interventions in the time-bound secular world he had created.  Tallis grants that’s a bad problem, but suggests atheists face an analogous one in working out how the eternal laws of physics relate to the local and particular world we actually live in.

These are interesting issues which bear on consciousness in at least two important ways, through human agency and the particularity of our experience; but today I want to leave the main road and run off down a dimly-lit alley that looks as if it contains some intriguing premises.

For the theists the problem is partly that God is omniscient and the creator of everything, so whatever happens, he should have foreseen it and arranged matters so that he does not need to intervene. An easy answer is that in fact his supposed interventions are actually part of how he set it up; they look like angry punishments or miraculous salvations to us, but if we could take a step back and see things from his point of view, we’d see it’s all part of the eternal plan, set up from the very beginning, and makes perfect sense. More worrying is the point that God is eternal and unchanging; if he doesn’t change he can’t be conscious.  I’ve mentioned before that our growing understanding of the brain, imperfect as it is, is making it harder to see how God could exist, and so making agnosticism a less comfortable position. We sort of know that human cognition depends on a physical process; how could an immaterial entity even get started? Instead of asking whether God exists, we’re getting to a place where we have to ask first how we can give any coherent account of what he could be – and it doesn’t look good, unless you’re content with a non-conscious God (not necessarily absurd) or a physical old man sitting on a cloud (which to be fair is probably how most Christians saw it until fairly recent times).

So God doesn’t change, and our developing understanding is redefining consciousness in ways that make an unchanging consciousness seem to involve a direct contradiction in terms. A changeless process? At this point I imagine an old gentleman dressed in black who has been sitting patiently in the corner, leaning forward with a kindly smile and pointing out that what we’re trying to do is understand the mind of God. No mere human being can do that, he says, so no wonder you’re getting into a muddle! This is the point where faith must take over.

Well, we don’t give up so easily; but perhaps he has a point; perhaps God has another and higher form of consciousness – metaconsciousness, let’s say – which resolves all these problems, but in ways we can never really understand.  Perhaps when the Singularity comes there will be robots who attain metaconsciousness, too: they may kindly try to explain it to us, but we’ll never really be able to get our heads round it.

Now of course, computers can already sail past us in terms of certain kinds of simple capacity: they can remember far more data much more precisely than we can, and they can work quickly through a very large number of alternatives. Even this makes a difference, I’ve mentioned before that exhaustive analysis by computers has shown that certain chess positions long considered draws are actually wins for one side: the winning tactics are just so long and complicated that human beings couldn’t see them, and can’t understand them intuitivel even when they see them played out.  But that’s not really any help; here we’re looking for something much more impressive. What we want to do is take the line which connects an early mammal’s level of cognition to ours and extend it until we’ve gone at least as far beyond the merely human. In facing up to this task, we’re rather like Flatlanders trying to understand the third dimension, or ordinary people trying to grasp the fourth: it isn’t really possible to get it intuitively, but we ought to be able to say some things about it by extrapolation.

So, early mammal – let’s call the beast Em (I don’t want to pick a real animal because that will derail us into consideration of how intelligent it really is) – works very largely on an instinctive or stimulus/resp0onse basis. It sees food, it pursues it and attempts to eat it. It lives in a world of concrete and immediate entities and has responses ready for some of them – fairly complex and somewhat variable responses, but fixed in the main. If we could somehow get Em to play chess with us, he would treat his men like a barbarian army, launching them towards us haphazardly en masse or one at a time, and we should have no trouble picking them off.

Human consciousness, by contrast, allows us to consider abstract entities (though we do not well understand their nature), to develop abstract general goals and to make plans and intentions which deal with future and possible events. These plans can also be of great complexity. We can even play out complicated long-range chess strategies if they’re not too complex.  This kind of thing allows us to do a better job than Em of getting food, though to Em a great deal of our food-related activity is completely opaque and apparently unmotivated. A lot of the time when we’re working on activities that will bring us food it will seem to Em as if we’re doing nothing, or at any rate, nothing at all related to food.

We can take it, then, that God or a future robot which is metaconscious will have moved on from mere goals to something more sophisticated – metagoals, whatever they are. He, or it, will understand abstractions as well as we understand concrete objects, and will perhaps employ meta-abstractions which they might be a little shakier about. God and the robot will at time have goals, just as we eat food, but their activities in respect of them will be both far more powerful and productive than the simple direct stuff we do and in our eyes utterly unrelated to the simpler goals we can guess at. A lot of the time they may appear to be doing nothing when they are actually pressing forward with an important metaproject.

But look, you may say, we have no reason to suppose this meta stuff exists at all.  Em was not capable of abstract thought; we are. That’s the end of the sequence; you either got it or you don’t got it. We got it: our memory capacity and so on may be improvable, but there isn’t any higher realm. Perhaps God’s objectives would be longer term and more complex than ours, but that’s just a difference of degree.

It could be so, but that’s how things would seem to Em, mutatis mutandis. Rocks don’t get food, he points out; but we early mammals get it. See food, take food, eat food: we get it. Now humans may see further (nice trick, that hind legs thing) they may get bigger food. But this talk of plans means nothing; there’s nothing to your plans and your abstraction thing except getting food. You do get food on a big scale, I notice, but I guess that’s really just luck or some kind of magic. Metaconsciousness would seem similarly unimaginable to us, and its results would equally look like magic, or like miracles.

This all fits very well, of course, with Colin McGinn’s diagnosis. According to him, there’s nothing odd about consciousness in itself, we just lack the mental capacity to deal with it. The mental operations available to us confine us within a certain mental sphere: we are restricted by cognitive closure. It could be that we need metaconsciousness to understand consciousness (and then, unimaginably, metametaconsciousness in order to understand metaconsciousness).

This is an odd place to have ended up, though: we started out with the problem that God is eternal and therefore can’t be conscious: if He can’t be conscious then He certainly can’t ascend to even higher cognitive states, can He? Remember we thought metaconsciousness would probably enable him to understand Platonic abstractions in a way we can’t, and even deal with meta-Platonic entities. Perhaps at that level the apparent contradiction between being unchanging and being aware is removed or bypassed, rather the way that putting five squares together in two dimensions is absurd but a breeze in three: hell, put six together and make a cube of it!

Do I really believe in metaconsciousness? No, but excuse me; I have to go and get food.

6 thoughts on “Metaconsciousness

  1. If you going to refute a theist argument, shouldn’t it be an argument made by a theist instead of one that you make up on their behalf? Otherwise you are guilty of constructing straw man arguments.

    Which theists make the argument about God that you are offering here?

  2. Jayarava,

    Nobody in the history of the world espoused the argument I put up here, if you mean meta consciousness. It would only be a straw man if I represented it as the theist position and hoped thereby to discredit theism, but I don’t at all. If anything I think the theist position gains credibility by being set against my silly speculations!

  3. Interesting post, will need to chew on it a bit. I’m trying to do what Jayarava suggests and read theist arguments – making my way through some Classical Theist stuff.

    Also looking at Whitehead, as his conception of God seems rather different than the Biblical one. From what I’ve gathered so far it recalls Freya Matthews’ version of panpsychism:

    http://www.freyamathews.net/full-text-articles

  4. Sci, don’t forget Spinoza in your reading list !!

    A hard materialist, that, paradoxically, wrote the best essay on God ever. Maybe, he will argue that Peter is wrong and, even without changing, an entity can be conscious if It is infinite. 😉

    It is only us, with a narrow beam attention focus, that require change (flow) to achieve “stream of consciousness” a la William James.

    Einstein, another hard materialist, and the best brain of the last centuries, held a very similar position, and struggled with determinism as you do.

    Peter, this meta-conscious idea is not that silly, in fact when we recall something abstract or we meditate, we do it to some extent. The idea would require some neurological scaffolding, like Trehub’s retinoid model for space management. The point is to identify a brain organ that monitors and processes the information of areas that are “working” on abstract tasks.

  5. Thanks for the rec Vincente. Spinoza is an interesting character – I’ve glanced at commentary of his work but definitely need to include him in my readings.

    Speaking of Einstein, I’m recently looking at Einstein vs Whitehead & Henri Bergson on the nature of time. Interesting stuff.

  6. I highly recommend David Roden’s Posthuman Life, which should be coming out any time now. Another interesting book that covers this topic (though in a wonderfully peculiar manner) is E. C. Steinhart’s Your Digital Afterlives, wherein he begins with first principles and reconstructs digitalism to it theological summit.

    McGinn’s cognitive closure argument doesn’t impress me to the extent that it takes our metacognitive intuitions seriously; it assumes an implausible cognitive ability (to intuit the truth of our phantasmagorical mentality) and then argues an implausible cognitive disability (our inability to figure out phantasmagorical truths). Where has Occam gone? Are we too limited to comprehend the ontological exceptionality of phenomenality and intentionality, or are too limited to intuit ourselves absent cognitive illusions such as the ontological exceptionality of phenomenality and intentionality? The latter strikes me as far more probable.

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