Consciousness Evolving

Full Title: Consciousness Evolving: Advances in Consciousness Research, volume 34.
Author / Editor: James H. Fetzer (Editor)
Publisher: John Benjamins, 2002

 

Review © Metapsychology Vol. 7, No. 9
Reviewer: Paul Gatto

Consciousness Evolving is
a collection of essays purportedly on the evolution of consciousness. The
introduction to this volume begins with the sentence, “An adequate
understanding of the evolution of consciousness presupposes an adequate
understanding of evolution, on the one hand, and of consciousness, on the
other.” It continues, “The former, alas,
appears to be more readily achieved than the latter.” It is certainly the case that evolution is
more clearly defined and understood, theoretically and practically, than
consciousness, for which we have no adequate definition much less a theory. 
One result of this, I think, is that Consciousness
Evolving
is a collection of good essays, but not a particularly good
collection of essays.

What’s
the difference? All eleven academic
essays included in this collection (I am including the contributions
mysteriously called the “Prologue” and “Epilogue”) are well-written and
interesting to varying degrees. In that,
they are good essays, meriting publication in academic journals, for
example. However, as a collection, in which a variety of perspectives on the
relations between evolution and consciousness are offered in a coherent
fashion, this book is poor. It fails to
give its essays a principled structure, such that they are grouped around
pivotal issues regarding the evolution of consciousness.

What
structure it does have looks like this: there are three sections, of three
essays each, entitled “Part I: Natural consciousness,” “Part II: Special
adaptations,” and “Part III: Artificial
consciousness.” Part I is concerned with
the sort of consciousness which might have been produced by natural selection,
whereas Part III considers the prospects for artificially selected for
consciousness; i.e., the possibility of consciousness in robots. Part II, curiously placed between the other
sections, does not seem to me, at least, to have a unifying
theme (though it is described on the book’s back cover as concerning “special
capacities involving language, creativity, and mentality as candidates for
evolved adaptations”). These
essays are, in turn, concerned with:

(1) the prospects for classical
theories of mind by examining the “evolvability” of a
“language of thought”—which is a notion pivotal to classical, computational
theories of mind (which hold that the mind is functionally equivalent to
software being run on our gray matter hardware) (James Garson’s “Evolution,
Consciousness, and the Language of Thought”);

(2) the
development of creativity as a solution to the puzzle of why phenomenal
consciousness (subjective experience) evolved (Bringsjord
and Noel’s “Why did Evolution Engineer Consciousness?”); and, (3) an argument
for idealism over dualism and materialism (Stephen Clark’s “Nothing without
Mind”).

These
sections are flanked by contributed essays called “Prologue” and “Epilogue,”
all of which is preceded by a brief introduction from the editor. Ordinarily, the editor’s introduction should
serve to provide a context for the contributor’s essays—relating them to each
other, to specific issues, and to the literature in the field—and explicating
the structure of their presentation, thereby providing a coherent picture of
the contribution to the field made by the collection’s disparate essays. Here, the editor’s introduction absolutely
fails to perform any of these functions, instead mere summarizing the essays,
often with their author’s own words (though, inexplicably, the authors are not
often credited for those words). The
Prologue and Epilogue should likewise serve functions similar to that of the
introduction, though here are simply two more essays. Stevan Harnad’s essay “Turing Indistinguishability
and the Blind Watchmaker” (here the Prologue) belongs in Part I, and Neil
Tennant’s “The Future with Cloning: On the Possibility of Serial Immortality”
(here the Epilogue) with fit more comfortably in Part III, if indeed it belongs
anywhere in this volume.

One
reason for the poverty of this collection’s scattered contribution to our
understanding of the evolution of consciousness, perhaps the principal reason,
is intimated in the above quotes from the introduction. Consciousness means many things, ranging from
simple awareness to robust phenomenological experience. It is considered an obvious fact about us by
some and an illusion by others. And, it
is significantly less well understood than evolution. As a result, many of the essays contained
herein concern themselves with consciousness—detailing various influential
theories, different ways to define and understand consciousness, and so on—to
the detriment of its relation to evolution. 

While it
is true that no essay fails to discuss (or at least reference) evolution during
its discussion of consciousness (though Graham and Horgan’s
“Sensations and Grain Processes,” David Cole’s “The Function of Consciousness,”
and Clark’s essay come close), many of the essays’ discussions of
evolution in relation to consciousness are perfunctory. If it were removed entirely, very little
would be lost. Exceptions to this
include the aforementioned essays by Harnad, Garson,
and Bringsjord and Noel, as well as Inman Harvey’s
“Evolving Robot Consciousness: The Easy Problems and the Rest,” and Polger and Flanagan’s “Consciousness, Adaptation and
Epiphenomenalism.”

Two of
the three essays in “Part III: Artificial Consciousness”—Nolfi
and Miglino’s “The Emergence of Grounded
Representations: The Power and Limits of Sensory-Motor Coordination” and Dario Floreano’s “Ago Ergo Sum”—also provide limited discussion
of the relation between consciousness and evolution, but in a different
way. Both of these interesting and
provocative articles are concerned with new approaches robotics—behavior-based
and evolutionary robotics—and the possibility of the development of
consciousness in robots. In this, these
new approaches to robotics provide fascinating case studies for the evolutionary
development of consciousness.  However,
they concern themselves with very low-level consciousness (Floreano
distinguishes this by calling it “proto-consciousness”), which is quite
different from the robust and problematic phenomenal consciousness discussed by
the other authors in this collection. 
While this approach is sensible and responsible, it makes for a
disconnection between these and the other essays in this volume.

Finally,
Tennant’s closing essay on the possibility of immortality through serial
cloning deserves special mention. While
this essay is called the “Epilogue,” it does nothing to provide closure or to
otherwise tie together the disparate strands of this collection. It also does not suffer the problem of
emphasizing the puzzle of consciousness to the detriment of evolution. On the contrary, it does not emphasize, or
even consider, consciousness at all. The
very word “consciousness” appears once in the entire essay, in a sentence
which, if it were removed from the essay, would not be missed. Tennant’s musings on the evolutionary
consequences of widespread reproductive cloning are thought provoking and
entertaining, but their presence in this volume, let alone as its epilogue, is
utterly mysterious.

This is
not a criticism of Tennant’s essay. 
Indeed, I have no qualms with any of these articles as such. I may agree or disagree with the authors’
contentions, but they are typically well presented and worthwhile. Some are excellent. However, it remains unclear to me why they
have been gathered together and presented as a discussion about the evolution
of consciousness.

 

© 2003 Paul Gatto

 

Paul Gatto is completing his doctoral work at UC
San Diego in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Categories: Philosophical, Genetics