philosophy of mind

AMA with Nate Soares. Wednesday 2/4 at 10am CT

Author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies answers questions about why superhuman AI would kill us all.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

______________________________________________________________

But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

______________________________________________________________

The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

PLANTS ARE NOT CONSCIOUS.  

This is my response to a post to a Facebook group post about the idea that plants and animals without brains have consciousness; that plants, and other life forms without nervous systems like ours, might also have it. The comment, albeit popular in a trendy sorta' way, is far from justified. Here's why:

_____________________________________

Moving the Goal Posts:

To start with consciousness isn’t being found in plants. There’s no evidence for that at all. What is happening is that the word itself is being reframed to include more physical processes than intellectual reflection. That’s not new, panpsychism has been around for hundreds of years, probably longer. What’s changed isn’t the "discovery", it’s the cultural redefining of what consciousness is. With all of the obstacles to overcome creating AIs, computer science started taking it seriously, so people stopped laughing at the idea, and that tolerance has spread to neurology and layman speculations about nature; BUT let’s be clear, there is no actual evidence for plant consciousness at all. None. There’s just a social shift to how popular culture is saying it should be defined. The problem being that simple reaction ISN'T consciousness.

When people say “plants are conscious,” what they’re really describing is what a plant does when it’s faced with something that might harm it, but that’s not awareness, it’s an evolved physical response. You grow your hair for evolutionary reasons too, but are you aware of your hair growing? Can you choose for it not to? Are you monitoring the process as it happens

__________________________________________________

What Actually is Consciousness?

Consciousness is an evolved, sophisticated result of the need for certain animals to move in complex ways for complex reasons. Take pain, as one example. Why does pain exist? Because when we’re in pain, we move away from it, QUICKLY. That’s its purpose. If you had to analyze pain before reacting, if say you leaned on a stove and had to think about whether to move or not, you’d be badly burned before you finished the thought. Pain bypasses thought. It makes us act now. It evolved due to the need for instant mobility.

A tree can’t move quickly. It doesn’t need pain. It doesn’t need that kind of awareness. ITS strategy is to become strong and massive so to withstand harm rather than avoid it. Grass handles harm by being flexible and abundant; one blade dies, another takes its place, the species survives. There’s no evolutionary pressure there for the kind of awareness pain provides animals. And since all of the emotions function as contextually behavioral presets using mobility as its medium like pain, plants have no reason to evolve those either.

Those preset reactions in us, are the roots of what we call “awareness.” The stored memories of predicted contexts that allows us to adjust our reactions more or less appropriately become our beliefs. And the total structural paradigm of those beliefs along with the emotions and awareness, cause our self-awareness, and our inner life, and THAT’s what we call "consciousness."

_______________________________________________________________

If Plants Don't Think, What Are We Looking At?

Another thing people with this "plants think" idea get wrong is that plants quite literally don’t think or talk to each other. More accurately put, they react to each other through fungi. It’s the fungi doing the coordination, not the plant. So if we want to assign consciousness to something you don't assign it to the foot, you assign it to the brain, if you git what I'm sayin'. Through mycorrhizal symbiosis fungi trade their stability and ability to distribute resources for the plant’s sugar and energy. The fungi decide how nutrients, water, and chemical signals are shared. If you want to talk about something “brain-like,” it’s the fungi, not the tree. The fungi organize the forest. The plant itself just reacts.

And this kind of cooperation; one organism joining with another to create a larger, organized whole; isn’t unique to plants and fungi. It happens between animals and like with pollinators, even between animals and plants. Then there's when one plant or animal survives as a parasite of the other. Interestingly, the prevailing theory is that this is how single-celled life evolved in the first place. One simple cell drifting through the world, over time, adapts to new environments and splits into variations. Two different variations meet again, and as it happens come to work together as it helped them both survive. The ones that don’t cooperate either have to evolve differently to survive or die out, and the ones working together, integrated until eventually one cell absorbed the other. The idea is that, that's how modern cells got their inner mechanisms, like the cell's nucleus, that made them more complex cells than just the simpler walled off sectioned cells that they'd evolved from.

Were those early cells (or even the modern ones) “conscious”? Of course not. They're only cells. But can they react? Absolutely. Reaction and cooperation aren’t awareness. They’re steps toward complexity.

_____________________________________________________

The Brain Itself is Not Responsible:

The post also brought up the idea that animals without centralized brains have their own consciousness, without a brain, and yeah, I'd have to agree with that. The thing is though, the pivotal mechanism creating consciousness isn’t the brain itself. It’s the nervous system within the brain. The brain works because it’s a highly organized communication network like hardware capable of running complex, shifting contexts. That’s what lets us think and feel. An octopus, as an example, has a distributed nervous system that allows for a similar kind of complexity, even though it’s organized differently than a centralized brain with a spinal cord.

So yes, you can have a brain without consciousness, but you can’t have consciousness without a nervous system (or something equally complex to serve as the hardware) .....even an analogue machine would do the job, it just wouldn't be as quick as what animals have. Plants don’t have that. Their structure simply doesn’t allow for the kind of integrated, layered processing that consciousness requires.

______________________________________________________________

But We Aren't Plants, How Can We Know For Sure?:

And I think it important to address an argument possibly implied in all of this; the idea that plant consciousness might just be too alien for us to recognize is neither an objective position, nor is it true. That we can’t judge them by our standards because we don’t share the same kind of mind doesn't keep us from a clear analysis and comparison of the mechanisms involved. This idea contradicts itself.

Our definitions of consciousness come from us, from humans observing and describing the world. Plants aren’t taking part in that. The word “consciousness” belongs to the language of beings talking to themselves, not the plants. If you say plants have it, you’re already using the word differently than someone who says they don’t, and in a way that compares what they experience to ours. Their assumptions are in the possibility of that comparison.

It’s not that we can’t know either way, that our hands are tied and we've no choice but to remain agnostic on this. The arguments I've already made stand on their own. It’s that we’re talking about different things entirely. People who side with making the determination rest on a definition of "consciousness" that's precise enough to be used deductively, making this a 'yes' or 'no' answer, while people who side with not making that determination rest on the idea that we don't really know what "consciousness" is.

The thing is, is that while we can't know the intricate details about every last horse that exists, WE ACTUALLY DO have a clear definition of what "horse" means regardless of the infinite focus on those details, and as long as the same can be said for "consciousness", whether anything has it, will be at some point determinable. That is UNLESS, some of us are determined to keep moving the goal posts without considering the mechanism, and the definition keeps becoming blurred.

To hopefully hit this point home, remember the old “how do I know your blue, is my blue?” argument? Sure, we can’t directly feel each other’s experience objectively, without tainting our perspectives with our own individual views, but what we can do is look at the mechanisms that produce them. We can see how the brain processes light, how those processes create the experience of color, and then compare those mechanisms between people. From that, we can define what the “blue” mechanism is, and how we're experiencing the same and different things when the color pops up. The same goes for consciousness. We can see the structures that support awareness, memory, and emotional integration, and plants simply don’t have them. So unless we stretch “consciousness” to mean “anything that reacts,” there’s simply no reason to say plants have it.

______________________________________________________________

The Popularity of the Idea That They Do:

So why are so many jumping on the bandwagon? It's the other "old" story. People project themselves into everything in order to understand them. It's anthropomorphism 101. Some of us can't even analyze anything without projecting our self centered human traits on to it. It's why prejudices pollute so many of the beliefs of so many of the people you see around you. Whenever you say to yourself "How can this guy be so blinded by this crazy idea?" think about what's happening here and whether there's actually anything at all pointing to the idea that plants can think.

We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative; we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up.  

OK I’ve tried talking about this before and it always feels impossible, but it also feels super important, so here goes, relatively uncensored (meaning super philosophical, my apologies and hope some of you enjoy!):

“We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative”

1. The nature of the universe is co-constructed / nondual: I think “experience” and “reality” are fundamentally intertwined; you can’t talk about a world out-there without a subjectivity talking about it (experiencing) and you can’t have an experiencing without a world out there (reality). In other words, subject and object (consciousness and matter) are one interpenetrated thingy. When I say “reality” I really mean “reality-experience” and when I say “experience” I really mean  “experience-reality.” Sometimes I just say “Life.”
   
   I mean this in a very extreme way.
   
   Not collapsing to the outer (materialism): This is not “there’s a pre-existing world out there, and many different pre-existing subjective views on it” which is the common way of understanding pluralism. That framing still fundamentally separates the outer world from the inner, and presumes a kind of self-existence of the outer without consciousness, which I think is basically epistemologically untenable. We simply can’t know if that’s possible, ever, because every thought- or real- experiment we do will always be known, by us, inside of a conscious experience.
   
   Not collapsing to the inner (idealism): This is also not “there’s no world out there, just constructs,” which I see as incoherently self-defeating: where do the constructs exist? We’re just hiding the fact that we presume constructs are objectively existing prior to that statement, and then declaring nothing inherently exists. It also doesn’t jive with out lived experience that there seem to be “things” like the laws of physics that are outside of our ability to simply construct a new meaning around. Perhaps the laws of physics are mutable, but we’d still be left with a meta-physics claim, like the one I’m making:
   
   The inner and outer, the consciousness and matter, fundamentally coexist as one occurrence. This is what I’m referring to as “life” in the title of this post.
   
   

1. From this claim I think another follows that there’s a (possibly) inviolable metaphysics of correspondence between the interpretation and world-out-there, a “mirror” to the (obvious to almost all adults) correspondence between the world-out-there and interpretation: eg I can reinterpret the experience of stubbing my toe, but I can’t reinterpret the existence of the table leg I stubbed it on. The most obvious inverse correspondence is that I can use my reinterpretation to change the outer world: let’s say I consider stubbing my toe a lesson, and what I learn from that lesson is that I want to move the location of my table. Now I move my table.
   
   You can probably see where I’m going with this.
   
   If I don’t have access to the interpretation that toe-stubbing is a lesson-opportunity, maybe I’m less likely to move the table, or change my walking patterns, or whatever. (Yes there’s another failure mode in thinking the lessons are always only internal lessons, but that’s recapping the “collapsing to the inner” mentioned above, so already covered I think). Having the lesson-frame changes the way we encounter and react to adversity, even as small as toe-stubbing. Any given frame changes the way we encounter and react to all that we experience, because they’re interpenetratingly one thing.
   
   

2. “Everything in my life is collaborative” is one of the interpretation-choices we all have; and it is causative in the same way “stubbing my toe is a lesson” is causative. I think this is a pragmatic statement of fact; here’s the value-laden one:
   
   Seeing everything that happens as collaborative is very good way to live, and results in greater well-being.
   
   It puts us in flow with what’s happening rather than resistance; it has us take self-responsibility for “what now” and keeps us close to where our actual power is (meaning making, as Frank said yesterday); all of this leads to a better experience regardless of your values and regardless of your life circumstances.
   

“we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame”

This feels very un-politically-correct to talk about because people immediately try to apply it to others. They misinterpret it to mean, “If someone has a shitty experience it’s their fault.” 

This is a mistake!

(1) I’m not using it to talk about others.
(2) The capacity to do something now doesn’t imply the capacity to have done something in the past.
(3) I’m definitely not saying it’s fair.

The statement is about everything in your life, not everyone’s life. The mistake at a philosophical level is trying to make it an “out there” proposition, instead of remembering the entanglement of inner-and-outer.

This clarification is super important because to the extent what I’m saying is true, it’s a huge, underutilized technology in well-being improvement available to you in your life, but it remains unavailable to you if you think that using it means you have to blame other people for their circumstances. Don’t do that! Not necessary! For personal use only! (Even when I apply these ideas in coaching sessions, and we teach them in The Relateful Coaching School, it’s always first from a place of asking questions, finding attunement.)

“but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up”

The other most common block to trying on this perspective is that we’re terrified of being this powerful: 

• What if we don’t use it responsibly? (Then you’d have the chance to see that as collaborative, taking the results as feedback)

• What if we can’t use it well? (There’s no standard—that’s an unnecessary imposition we make up in our heads; and I don’t know if there’s an end either, so we’re always growing in capacity, if we want to) 

• Does this mean it’s our fault if we don’t have a good experience? (no, remember that would be collapsing the outer to the inner)

And we’re terrified at facing the reality of how deeply interconnected we are. 

This means the “I” that I think I am really is indistinguishable from the entire world, which calls into the question the nature of that I. This is a scary thing to face, in my experience. Luckily, as far as I can tell the nature of reality-experience is holonic—transcendence always comes with including. So yes, I am much much bigger than whatever concept I make of myself, but that bigness doesn’t erase the concept or the me, it simply contextualizes it in something much grander. Which ironically, gives us a lot more room for self-expression, play, and surrendering into embracing the whole human experience with all of it’s complexity, suffering, and joy.

#DeepTakes 

Brain as a Prediction Machine. This is my first post on here since Dara invited me a few months ago. Feels like it might be a fun place to discuss consciousness and brains.

In my Cognition and Emotion class in grad school, we just watched this video. In it, Andy Clark discusses the Predictive Processing framework for consciousness. As I understand it, basically the hypothesis is that brains are prediction machines. They model the world the state of the environment moment-to-moment. They're constantly updating models of the world and using both outside data and internal models to construct perception. The main "stuff" of consciousness (qualia) are prediction errors--data that wasn't already predicted by the models. 

What do ya'll think about this hypothesis?

Edit: Video I put in the URL doesn't seem to be showing up, so pasting it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Ghrd7NBtk

Brain as a Prediction Machine. This is my first post on here since Dara invited me a few months ago. Feels like it might be a fun place to discuss consciousness and brains.

In my Cognition and Emotion class in grad school, we just watched this video. In it, Andy Clark discusses the Predictive Processing framework for consciousness. As I understand it, basically the hypothesis is that brains are prediction machines. They model the world the state of the environment moment-to-moment. They're constantly updating models of the world and using both outside data and internal models to construct perception. The main "stuff" of consciousness (qualia) are prediction errors--data that wasn't already predicted by the models. 

What do ya'll think about this hypothesis?

Edit: Video I put in the URL doesn't seem to be showing up, so pasting it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Ghrd7NBtk