Emergent Consciousness

One meaning of emerge is to come into existence. This implies that something new exists where it didn't exist before. Man emerged from fish - if you believe in the most radical version of evolution. And fish emerged from... non-living stuff. Live emerged from non-life. How can this be? A lot of people think it cannot be. If something new comes into existence, then it must have been created by some intelligent entity. I'd like to side-step that issue for now and talk about what emergence really means, especially with respect to intelligence and consciousness. Can consciousness emerge from unconscious processes?

One of my favorite examples of emergence is the property of temperature. Temperature is a property of many molecules moving at different speeds and directions. The greater the disparity in their movement, the higher the temperature. If they are all moving in exactly the same direction and speed then there is absolute zero - which is still a temperature. No single molecule can have a temperature because that property emerges only when you consider a population of molecules. Put multiple molecules together and something new emerges that simply does not exist in a single molecule. 


Can consciousness work the same way? Put a bunch of unconscious stuff together and suddenly you get consciousness? No secret sauce, no divine spark, it just emerges. I personally think that this is true, but who cares what I think. However, as a working hypothesis subject to being proven false, it could be a great start. Actually, you have to reverse the hypothesis and presume that consciousness cannot simply emerge, and then demonstrate a single instance of it actually happening, to make scientific progress here. This is a lot different than artificial intelligence. Computers can mimic intelligent behavior without being conscious, without "knowing" what they are doing, but how can you know if it's indeed conscious? I don't think we have a good enough definition yet to be able to measure it scientifically, but I do think we can grasp enough of an idea of it that we can make progress.


One idea I've read is that intelligence can emerge from crowd behavior. If you have dozen's of people guessing at something, like the weight of an elephant, the crowed average is frequently amazingly close to the right answer. However, there is no crowd entity that is "above" the crowd and suddenly becomes alive on it's own. No, this - if it happens reliably and not just randomly - it would be emergent intelligence, not emergent consciousness.


At the core of consciousness is the idea of self-knowing. The idea that one knows what they know; meta-knowledge. It's not enough to react, one has to contemplate options and chose their action before we might consider them conscious. So who is it that is doing the inner knowing? The old idea of a homunculus arises - the idea that each of us really exists as an inner person who witnesses what the outer person is doing and thus controls the outer person. But ... then who is the homunculus of the homunculus? Removing the mystery one level does not answer it. There must be a beginning, or something that consciousness emerges from, to break the cycle and avoid infinite regression.


Marvin Minsky, in his seminal The Society of Mind, 1982, disputed the very idea of consciousness by positing that our minds are merely a collection of little experts that act in concert to achieve higher levels of thinking. One homunculus wasn't enough for him, he wanted us to have thousands. And with thousands of inner experts - there was nothing left to emerge except intelligent behavior. I never found his work compelling. In fact, that whole direction of expert systems as a model of artificial intelligence has failed to live up to the hype. This doesn't stop new classes of students from trying it again - the MIT media lab project Concept Net is essentially a rehash of Doug Lenat's failed Cyc project from the 1980s. (That fact that Lenat is still trying to get it out of the lab and into the real world doesn't mean it hasn't failed.)


Not wanting this to become a book...I'll stop here for now. But I hope I've given you something to think about. Whatever that means.