Sometimes I get involved in sharing ideas on forums that interest me. A long-time favorite of mine is “The Online Journal of Consciousness“. Although the conversation ranges widely, it sometimes gravitates in the direction of my passion for theory of knowledge. In one such exchange, Randy called my attention to an article about the emergent and self-organizing properties of the brain. I was excited enough about his contribution to blog it as “The Competitive Edge: Minds on the Brink of Chaos“. In this entry I am sharing a follow-on contribution that I authored to Randy that caused a bit of a stir. Many readers will find it a bit dense, so I am posting using the “Read More” tag. Forewarned is forearmed.
Marc,
thanks for the well thought out post. We are largely in agreement although, since self organizing criticality does not explain qualia, there has to be more to the picture.
Randy,
Randy,
Qualia? Qualia? I don’t need no stinkin’ qualia!
We agree that brain and mind as process, are are best understood in terms of self-organizing criticality. This process is bounded by the ever-flowing interaction between an organism and its environment. It is mediated by the organism’s sensory faculties which are in turn attuned to, and synchronized with features of its environment in ways that work for that organism in a given time and place. This in itself explains what I think of as the raw awareness that serves to guide an organism in its behavior, but it is not sufficient to explain consciousness in terms of self-aware reflexive action. The awakening to consciousness in this sense, requires something more, but the notion of “qualia” is not particularly helpful. Bats have no notion of what it is like to be a bat. Bat-ness is a problem of consciousness and though bats are aware, I do not believe that they are conscious.
Instead, we need only agree that the world “out there” exists and that we experience it in terms of our human sensory bandwidth in a manner that has proven useful in the Darwinian sense. Consciousness stems from a process by which our sensory experience comes to be coordinated, synchronized, and eventually shared, with others. Given certain physiological and environmental preconditions, this process is rooted in social interaction through which the raw awareness of individuals is rendered as a socially constructed, intersubjective, externality. In other species (termites) social interaction gives rise to complex constellations of behavior that are irreducible and continually evolving. In the case of humans, experience as raw awareness comes to be mediated by socially constructed symbolic representations of the world we sense and in which we behave. In-process (existentially), this is also a bumpy flow of self-organizing criticality. But our experience of “knowing” is one of the symbolic objectification of others and self, in which we come to experience self-created cultural representations. These symbolic representations are essentially a body of cultural artifacts in which we are immersed (our termite nests?), the symbolic meaning of which is constantly being transformed both in behavior and in action (intentionally). From this we can conclude that our conscious experience of self and qualia are examples of these cultural artifacts in which our raw awareness becomes mediated by our symbolic representations. When we bump into a tree, we react by taking a new course but when we bump into a “TREE” the range of actions available to us become much greater. Thus far, our termite nests made up from an ongoing process of linguistic construction (interactive story telling) have worked pretty well.
We experience and act in a world that is made up of what is given to us by what is “out there” AND what is constructed by us “in here”. Try as we may, we cannot escape our aquarium in which we experience the world as conscious actors.
Regards,
Marc
