Anthropic Consciousness

Stephen Hawking’s recent death caused many to glance regretfully at the unread copies of A Brief History Of Time on their bookshelves. I don’t even own one, but I did read The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow, and discussed it here. It’s a bold attempt to answer the big questions about why the universe even exists, and I suggested back then that it showed signs of an impatience for answers which is characteristic of scientists, at least as compared with philosophers. One sign of Hawking’s impatience was his readiness to embrace a version of the rather dodgy Anthropic Principle as part of the foundations of his case.

In fact there are many flavours of the Anthropic Principle. The mild but relatively uninteresting version merely says we shouldn’t be all that surprised about being here, because if we hadn’t been here we wouldn’t have been thinking about it at all. Is it an amazing piece of luck that from among all the millions of potential children our parents were capable of engendering, we were the ones who got born? In a way, yes, but then whoever did get born would have had the same perspective. In a similar way, it’s not that surprising that the universe seems designed to accommodate human beings, because if it hadn’t been that way, no-one would be worrying about it.

That’s alright, but the stronger versions of the Principke make much more dubious claims, implying that our existence as observers really might have called the world into existence in some stronger sense. If I understood them correctly, Hawking and Mlodinow pitched their camp in this difficult territory.

Here at Conscious Entities we do sometimes glance at the cosmic questions, but our core subject is of course consciousness. So for us the natural question is, could there be an Anthropic-style explanation of consciousness? Well, we could certainly have a mild version of the argument, which would simply say that we shouldn’t be surprised that consciousness exists, because if it didn’t no-one would be thinking about it. That’s fine but unsatisfying.

Is there a stronger version in which our conscious experience creates the preconditions for itself? I can think of one argument which is a bit like that. Let me begin by proposing an analogy in the supposed Problem of Focus.

The Problem of Focus notes that the human eye has the extraordinary power of drawing in beams of light from all the objects around it. Somehow every surface around us is impelled to send rays right in to that weirdly powerful metaphysical entity which resides in our eyes, the Focus. Some philosophers deny that there is a single Focus in each eye, suggesting it changes constantly. Some say the whole idea of a Focus with special powers is an illusion, a misconception of perfectly normal physical processes. Others respond that the facts of optometry and vision just show that denying the existence of Focus is in practice impossible; even the sceptics wear glasses!

I don’t suppose anyone will be detained for long by worries about the Probkem of Focus; but what if we remove the beams of light and substitute instead the power of intentionality, ie our mental ability to think about things. Being able to focus on an item mentally is clearly a useful ability, allowing us to target our behaviour more effectively. We can think of intentionality as a system of pointers, or lines connecting us to the object being thought of. Lines, however, have two ends, so the back end of these ones must converge in a single point. Isn’t it remarkable that this single focus point is able to draw together the contents of consciousness in a way which in fact generates that very state of awareness?

Alright, I’m no Hawking…

12 thoughts on “Anthropic Consciousness

  1. Have you read Brian Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects? Because your intentionality/focus metaphor reminds me strongly of his views, and the book would be right up your alley.

  2. The eye always gives good analogies to the rest of the brain, but no need to think those analogies are quaint. No need to think that nature changed course when it made the part of the brain that gathers physical data outside the skull. Instead of a retina and an optic nerve system that distributes to V1 and all over the brain or the visual system is the most complex and higher sense or real root of cognitive thought and language. But the rest of the neocortex has its own ‘optic nerve’ system that terminates down into the limbic system and episodic memory through the hipocampus, thalamus and other structures. Little wonder that noted scientist Lawrence Krauss and others get accused of having active limbic systems that have lead to sexual allegations. Hawking himself enjoyed his own sexual life https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/stephen-hawking-said-to-frequent-sex-club_n_1307625.html Little wonder that we are all here because Mom and Dad enjoyed dating one another that lead to marriage.

    So what is the point? Our ability to focus many parts of our brains generated the knowledge to know what room, house, town, forest, island etc. we lived in and by default science taught us what planet, galaxy, universe etc. Our folk psychology gave us the ability to read the emotional and volitional states of others and by default we projected it into the Anthropic Principle.

  3. I couldn’t find my old copy of “Brief History” and it’s been years since I read it, but I did watch the rerun of the old series featuring Hawking sitting in an empty sanctuary?, contemplating God and the universe. I have to disagree that he accepts anything more than the mildest version of AP. What he does embrace is the idea that there are (were) so many Big Bangs that it is not surprising at all that one of them spawned us. To me, that does not qualify for being an AP.

  4. Lloyd, it’s not in his earlier stuff, but quite explicit later. From ch 7 of The Grand Design:

    The weak anthropic principle is not very controversial. But there is a stronger form that we will argue for here, although it is regarded with disdain among some physicists. The strong anthropic principle suggests that the fact that we exist imposes constraints not just on our environment but on the possible form and content of the laws of nature themselves.

  5. “ Isn’t it remarkable that this single focus point is able to draw together the contents of consciousness in a way which in fact generates that very state of awareness?”

    What you say applies well to humans that are self-conscious. But can’t we consider that animals can unconsciously focus mentally on an item without generating a very state of awareness?
    I believe that there is an animal ‘aboutness’. Animals maintain their living status by identifying predators (a bird seeing a cat is about danger). The process belongs to their living nature and their senses naturally focus on these identifications. Developed animals manage representations that are meaningful relatively to their vital constraints. They naturally focus on items mentally.
    I feel that limiting intentionality to humans surreptitiously introduces the performance of self-consciousness which imposes a level of complexity that is not necessary and makes the story more difficult.
    This may not be precisely the subject of your post but I find it difficult to understand why most philosophers are reluctant to take into account some sort of bio-intentionality.

  6. In my view, most anthropic principles are misguided in the same manner as viewing all of evolution as progress towards us. From our perspective (the anthropic perspective), it may appear that the universe, the earth, evolution, and the overall laws of physics are fine tuned for us. (It’s a theme that runs through most religious creation stories.) But the reality is that we evolved from these things. *We* are fine tuned for the earth (well, certain portions of it), the universe, and the laws of physics, not the other way around.

    I’ve never heard of The Problem of Focus before. Interesting.

    If I’m understanding correctly, the lines converge on the mental concept, the model of the external object. I think the mental concept is a mechanism to facilitate predictions of future sensory perceptions related to the object. Of course, similar to the above, our ability to create a mental concept of the object is fine tuned to give us predictions about it accurate enough to enhance our survival prospects around it. In that view, the convergences should not be viewed as coincidental.

  7. Peter, I think the Problem of Focus is quite apt. Just like the light beams actually go throughout all the points of space (through air, anyway), and we simply care about the one point which an eyeball sprays on the retina, intentionality goes throughout the brain, and we care only (well, mostly) about the one (functional, not spatial) point where that intentionality gets interpreted as an outside concept.

    For example, consider a “red” cone cell in a retina. The cone cell absorbs a red photon and spits out glutamate. The sole function of that glutamate is to be a symbolic sign that the red photon happened. Every neuron does the same thing. Each one spits out an arbitrary sign whose purpose is to be able to link back to the conditions which caused the neuron to fire. Each neuron is a “[pointer], or [line] connecting […] to the object[s]” which caused it to fire.

    So the question becomes, as you say, is there a single point where these chains converge? Actually, there are probably at least a few such points. They are the places which take the signs produced by neurons at the end of the chain and generate a response which is functional in light of the objects at the beginning of the chain. (It can be expected that the end of the chain constitutes the integration of more than one beginning chain.) These places constitute the various selves described by Damasio and others. For example, the brain stem seems to represent one such self.

    But the self that most philosophers really care about is referred to as the autobiographical self. I have hypothesized that the autobiographical self is represented by a specific organ in the brain where all these chains ultimately end up. That organ is the thalamus, although there is room to include some other sub-cortical parts. My point is that the neocortex is the umwelt of the autobiographical self.

    *
    [For the record, red cone cells don’t work as described above. Instead of producing glutamate when they absorb a photon, they are producing glutamate all the time. They stop producing glutamate when they absorb a photon. The absence of glutamate is the sign that causes the next neuron in the chain to fire.]

  8. James, thanks. It does seem plausible to me that while the cortex is doing a lot of important stuff for human consciousness – your umwelt – it’s somewhere in the ‘older’ brain that things come together in a self.

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