Mike Carrell wrote:
Jed is on the right track. two authors come to mind, Hofstadter and
Edelman [a Nobel Laureate]. Hofstadter is author of "Godel Escher
Bach" and "I Am a Strange Loop". I have read Edelman's "The
Remembered Present" and am reading "Second Nature". All these books
relate to the sudy of consciousness.
These books are way over my head!
I get my info from biology papers, lectures on UCTV, medical research
and the books by Oliver Sacks. I alluded to some of this in chapter
10. I know about actual field research, rather than abstract and
philosophical treatments.
When I talk about "self awareness" I mean it literally, on the
physical level. I mean the ability to distinguish your own body from
other creatures and other objects in the environment. Low level
animals such as worms do not have this. Insects have it on a limited
basis, as I mentioned. They cannot distinguish between other
individuals members of their own species, and they are easily fooled
by decoys. Some animals have a little self awareness, while others
have as much as we do. You can find examples of some in the middle.
For example, cows will recognize people, and individual people, but
when they see a person on a horse they fail to recognize that it is
the same person they saw on the ground previously. Apparently they
think of a person plus horse as one object (one creature), just as
some Native Americans did when they first saw Europeans on horses from afar.
We know that self-awareness is somehow hard-wired into the brain
because it can be damaged or destroyed by accident or disease, as
described by Sacks. Some patients do not recognize their own legs as
being part of their own bodies. Other patients lose proprioreception,
which I think is related. (That is, they do not know what their body
is doing, or where their limbs are located.)
This ability is generalized, or extended to the ability to recognize
and categorize objects such as animate and inanimate objects,
different species, different individuals, and the mood of different
individuals and so on.
I believe such abilities are more highly developed in predator
species than others. Most primates including us are predators and we
have it in abundance. Dogs are well known for being able to "read"
the emotions and intentions of people, other dogs, prey animals and
so on. They can distinguish between many different objects, animals
and individual animals. I mentioned sheep herding dogs. What they do,
in essence, is to treat the herd exactly the way wolves and other
dogs treat herds of prey animals. In the wild, dogs manipulate the
herd, direct its movement, read the intentions of individual members,
separate out individuals, and kill them. They recognize complex
situations and they can put themselves into the mind and condition of
their prey to some extent, for example recognizing that a sheep with
a hurt leg is moving slowly and in panic. (In other words, at some
level, the dog is thinking: "Ah, ha! That one looks like her leg is
hurt; she's an easy target." The dog is not standing there oblivious
as to why the prey animal is acting in a particular way or getting
left behind.)
Sheep herding dogs use exactly the same skills, only they are
domesticated so they stop at the last stage and do not kill. Dogs
work in packs, coordinating their efforts. Sheep herding dogs are
coordinated by the human shepherd, who issues orders by whistling.
They also coordinate with one another, by barking and other
signaling, just as wild packs do. They think of it as a game, and
they are wildly enthusiastic about it.
Dogs and all other animals have specialized intelligence for specific
applications which is far beyond our own. Dogs know the moods and
personalities of the individual sheep. In fact, they know way more
about sheep than you or I do, and probably more than the world's
leading experts on sheep. Their responses and sensitivity to sheep
behavior is lighting fast. If that were not the case they would have
gone extinct long ago. This is not conscious knowledge; even if a dog
could master language you could not interview and ask it how it does
what it does. What they have is subconscious knowledge similar to the
knowledge baseball player has of where a ball is likely to go the
moment it has been hit. A baseball player hears the sound of the bat
striking the ball and instantly knows approximately where and how far
the ball is headed, and begins running in the right direction. This
is very complex mathematical processing of sound, similar to the
sonolocation done by bats (the animals -- not the baseball bat!). Of
course it is completely subconscious. It is learned behavior, not
instinctual like the bat's abilities.
Consciousness, by the way, just means being aware of your
surroundings -- as far as I know. Inputting stimuli and reacting to
it. Any animal with sense organs has some level of consciousness,
unless it is asleep, damaged, or anesthetized. Of course levels of
consciousness vary tremendously, and they grow more sophisticated as
the number of brain cells increase. Sentience is a complicated
version of consciousness and I do not know how -- or if -- biologists
have a rigorous definition of it yet. No doubt they will develop one
sooner or later. There is no reason to think that brain functions and
diseases will remain muddled, undefined or difficult to characterize
indefinitely. If you read 17th century medical literature you find
all kinds of diseases and biological conditions described in what we
would consider topsy-turvy confused ways, with false distinctions in
some cases and real distinctions ignored. Conditions of the brain are
still, to some extent, mired in that premodern confusion, because the
brain is the most complex organ, and the most difficult to treat. I
have little doubt that most forms of mental illness, for example,
have specific organic causes and will someday be cured.
- Jed
