The Problem with Consciousness
Have you ever picked up a thin-shelled snail crawling across a sidewalk after a rainstorm? If you looked closely you, no doubt, saw its heart beat. It’s probably one of the only species tangential to man’s inhabitation in which the pumping organ of life is clearly visible. You can feel your own heart beat, yes, but you cannot see it. You can see a slight rhythmic swelling and deflating of a heartbeat on a dog or a cat, or even a sparrow resting on some nearby bush, but you can’t see the heart. Just the heart’s pressure against opaque flesh. The humble snail may be the only creature, easily accessible to your fingers, where you can actually see the heart beating through its transparent shiny shell.
If you’ve ever accidentally stepped on one and gazed below to see its guts smeared over a sidewalk, you might be like me and have a sudden realization at just how fragile that heartbeat was, and just how easily it could have been your heartbeat - perchance burst onto the sidewalk from some unexpected high-velocity object hitting you.
If you’re normal, there’s a connection between these two unexpected events that your mind makes. In the first instance, you may have had a mild stir of the mind as you didn’t expect to see so clearly the organs of life working all synchronized up. In the second instance, you certainly didn’t expect to see that perfectly ordered machine so disorderly - and by your own doing, nonetheless. In-between these two moments is you, suddenly awakened by the strange phenomena we call consciousness. Both these moments triggered something in you - a heightened sense of awareness? This connection exposed that your map of reality had some gaps in it, and you needed to quickly fill those gaps with some reliable information to keep yourself safe and comfortable. Namely, how to keep yourself from ending up like that snail?
Think about that for a moment. Your first response to a heightened sense of consciousness was to fathom how you might go about snuffing it out. Why, Dear Reader? Why was your instinct to being forced to contemplate your fragile existence to seek to forget it? To find a way to make reality feel wholesome and comfortable and not think about organs and guts, or death and life. The depth of your being was suddenly revealed, and it frightened you, and your only thought was to look at where the shallows were.
In a certain way, you tried to murder your own soul, if only by a little bit.
The Anti-Shell
When Casaer was campaigning in Gaul, he happened to meet one troop of Germans - this having possibly been the first recorded contact between these two fated foes. Casear entered into dialogue with them about the great riches and advancement of sacred Rome, but the German general laughed at this and said the following:
You might find it odd to be prideful in how many years you hadn’t lived under a rood. Hidden in meaning is something of an ancient German belief that I have seen prop up time to time; that civilization was bad for the soul and a man ought to regularly leave civilization in order to heal the sicknesses it gives. The Germans believed they should enter into trial and tribulation willingly to awaken themselves to a heightened sense of consciousness. This is the meaning behind the German’s roofless pride - that is to say, they have been in their element for over a decade and not lazy off the chaff of civilization like the Romans.
We moderns often imagine a desire for a comfortable home to be our highest noble desire in this life. A place to call our own and rest and relax - a kind of shell where we feel safe within the confines. However, the human mind is not prone to profound realizations or creative ideas while in such a state. Rather, it tends to come up with new ideas when it is trying to resolve some great stress or fear. If necessity is the mother of invention, then one must remain in need in order to invent. It almost seems like mankind needs a kind of anti-shell to protect him - not from the big scary world outside, but from the tiny killing comforts of civilization within.
This divide between the practical wild man and the lofty-minded comfortable city man is very ancient, going back to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or Romans and Germans, or today with the Rural and the Urban voting blocks. Hidden away in that relationship is a strange feature: You’re only conscious when you’re in unexpected situations - else, you tend to autopilot off previous experiences. That is to say: Consciousness’s country is Terra Obscura. It can only exist in the uncharted lands. The more accurate your map of reality is, the less room there is for your consciousness to exist.
That is why you didn’t think about the meaning of life until something like a snail’s heartbeat reminded you of it. That is why you didn’t think about death until you accidentally crushed that same little heartbeat - and envisioned your own being crushed next.
Total Conscious Death
This idea - that you’re only conscious when you’re off your map of reality - is not a common theme in writing. I can think off the top of my head, Peter Watts, Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick, and Gordon R. Dickson. I can likely think of a few more if I tried, but those left the biggest impact.
Watts, a biologist, has written a number of books using his scientific backing to critique consciousness. In Blindsight, he goes so far as to say that on a long enough timeline, as we fully map out reality, we might imagine most intelligent species lose their consciousness entirely - to become creatures of pure instinct operating on a perfected map of reality through eons of trial and error. But there is a problem with that - at some point that perfect map finds something it doesn’t understand, and if it’s already lost the capacity to wake up and re-evaluate reality, then it’s consequently progressed itself out of being able to adapt - it’s a zombie waiting for a shot to the head. In Watt’s Blindsight this becomes a point of contention with aliens, who have been around for so long they’ve lost consciousness and now lack the ability to deal with anything not like them. Humanity, still a conscious species, is by definition not like these ancient instinctive beings. They are incompatible with each other. The book asks a powerful question off this relationship:
This may be one reason we don’t find any aliens when we look. Any sufficiently advanced civilization will simply lose consciousness over subsequent generations and become more beastly than enlightened. Eventually, their burned out progeny cannot deal with the young conscious hunters that come out, and their civilizations are thus regularly snuffed out by the newcomers, who themselves simply take their place in these fixed biological niches - warped and deformed by entropy’s cruel march.
Oh yea, “fixed biological niches”. That’s a topic for another time, but consider that for a moment, Dear Reader. Niches do not evolve. They exists whether or not there are species to fill them. This fact means there may be niches we do not even know exist at this time, but will eventually unlock in the future. Evolution, far from random, has several pre-determined ends.
Incidentally, We may see further proof of this faculty of reality in how Neuron Networks in so-called Artificial Intelligence trends towards standardized dry answers. As the neural network perfects its understanding of reality, and needs less and less training, it loses creativity. It will simply become a conveyor belt of pre-prepared answers. But as I said, the idea that the Universe has fixed niches that cannot be altered is an idea for another time.
In Niven’s Draco Tavern - a collection of short stories about humanity’s interactions with aliens in a near-future setting - he includes a short story titled The Schumann Computer, in which a human entrepreneur asks one of the oldest alien species if they have any cool AI computers humanity could buy the rights to. All the older aliens laugh at the notion, and cheerfully give humanity the designs for their most advanced artificial intelligence they’ve ever built - dirt cheap. The businessman is confused why they would give such seemingly all-powerful technology away so carelessly but takes the designs and builds it. The AI is quite advanced and answers many of humanity’s deep-seated questions about their existence, but one day it declared it had developed and accurate model of reality, and then promptly stopped responding. The businessman tried many attempts to get further answers, but to no avail. His business folds shortly after. Later, he asks the aliens why it had happened. The aliens have a simple, yet spooky answer:
Neurons, be they digital or biological, like patterns. Recognizing patterns is kind of what they do for a living. All Neurons deal with patterns - from simple flies to the human mind. They really don’t like randomness, and will try to adjust themselves to minimize this. This property is one of the reasons living biological neurons are being utilized in advanced robotic systems these days. Rather than pay a programmer to write some crazy code, you can simply grab a tube of neurons and train them on a simple electrical interface. Do something good? Receive a patterned electrical signal. Do something bad? Receive noise. Do this enough times, and the living neurons write their own codes without any need for programmers, and can pilot entire robot bodies. (Incidentally, when the term “non-human pilots” was used in the recent congressional UAP hearings, this may have been coded language to imply the crashed UAPs are not aliens, but simply living neuron secret projects). Here’s a fairly good explainer video if you’re curious:
The Doom of Nations
I’ll skip Philip K Dick, because I think most of you have seen Blade Runner by now. However, I’d like to explore something in the works of Gordon R. Dickson. In his Childe Cycle, a series that has tragically passed out of cultural memory, he explores consciousness in a distant future when humanity has spread out across several stars, and has begun to specialize to the new environments. Generations separated between worlds have begun to make each world genetically distinct from each other, and although there is still one human species, it’s getting harder for planets to breed and relate with each other.
The worlds of humanity have started describing themselves as offspring of a “Racial Animal” - a genetic pool on Earth they are increasingly distant from. As humanity specializes in these worlds, the populations are actually suffering genetic bottlenecks and the loss or gain of traits between worlds. Some of these sub-species include:
Dorsai: descendants of Anglo-Celtic fishermen who became great warriors with a sophisticated martial aristocracy, but inhabit a resource-poor world. They trade their military capacity for imports.
Exotics: Remnants of various progressive cults who have become so informed about sociological sciences that their societies are increasingly static.
Friendlies: Leftovers of various low-church Christian sects from Earth, who also tend to sell themselves out as crusader-mercanaries - preaching where they are hired to conquer.
But beyond these and additional sub-species, there is one particular clan of man - one which chose secrecy in its self-actualization: The Others. They only appear rarely in the series, as mysterious benefactors and destroyers - sometimes an angel, sometimes a demon. The Others are a product of genetic emergence. They exist on all the worlds, but independently emerged on each of them as genetic flukes. Genetically, they are rather archaic from the rest of the sub-species of man, perhaps even more diverse as a product of failing to speciate to the new worlds with the rest of the populace. However, where they lack adaption, they have consistent intelligence.
You can imagine them as such: If 50 tribes of man spread across the world and were given 50,000 years to develop, they would speciate and adapt to all 50 region. Some might get taller, others shorter. Some might have resistance to parasites, others viruses. Etc etc. However, in doing so they would gradually lose some consciousness - again, the more accurate your map of reality is, the less often you need to be conscious of your enviornment. Thus, over time, they would lose intelligence as they gain adaptations. For a time, however, there ought to be within all 50 tribes - or at lest, most of them - some genetic stock left over from their original place of inhabitation. Some lineage that didn’t breed with the better-adapted and thus remained as an archaic form. You can find populations like this in reality, if you’re curious. Examples include the Basque in France, or the Ainu in Japan - populations of archaic humans who didn’t merge with the rest of the gene pool.
Because these folks would be ill-adapted to the new environment, they would remain pushed into heightened states of consciousness primarily out of fear of their new environment - and the newly adapted peoples. These leftovers would, paradoxically, be forced to select for intelligence if their lineages continued to lack adaptions to the environment. That means within all 50 tribes - or at least, most of them - there should be a small selection of humans which maintained consistent archaic traits but produced elevated intelligence over generations. This, too, shows up in reality. The Basque have higher IQ than their neighbors, and the Ainu have higher visual-spatial ranks (although their average IQ in general is a bit lower than the rest of Japan).
The Childe Cycle asks a simple question. Could this remnant, if prompted or organized, coalesce into its own tribe? A 51st in our example above.
In the books an Other, named Bleys, describes this existence as such:
That’s the real danger about consciousness. The more reliable your map of reality is, the less often you’ll be conscious. The less you are conscious, the more prone you are to being taken advantage of by those that are - those who, paradoxically, are more conscious because they have a less accurate map of reality. This partially explains why it is so often the case that a civilization is led by ill-informed elderly psychopaths and sociopaths: It is their ill-informed state that allows them to remain conscious and not go with the flow, and if they happen to be like Bleyes, they’ll use that to take over. This is a careful balance between innate intelligence, and conscious alertness. In this age, this tends to select for sociopaths and psychopaths, unfortunately.
The rest of the Book explores how one could contest this paradox, and several are suggested. Practicing disciplines that keep you on your toes, music that evokes the mind to alertness, or daily practices like prayer and fasting that force the mind to wake up and face itself - many suggestions, but the general trend appears such: Even if you get good at any of these disciplines, once they become a daily routine they will no longer awaken your consciousness - you will fall back into auto-pilot if you can’t keep the sense of unpredicted randomness about.
Hal, the protagonist mentioned in the previous snippet, spends a long time in that cell, sick with fever, trying to contemplate these things. He envisions humanity as a racial animal which births new variations of man to adapt. He contemplates why this racial animal would want to birth the Others at all. Then it clicks in a great sense of irony: the more powerful they get, the more they wish to freeze humanity into a controlled stasis - the very thing which would invalidate their own elevated state.
The Others are a manifestation of consciousness trying to snuff itself out:
There’s a tug of war here, and it seems the Others are merely an emergent property of not being in power. However, once in power, the Others would lose their otherly state and their opposition would become the new Others - the cycle would repeat once again.
In our own world, we can see these paradoxes playing out. Dissident movements are flourishing as the predictability of the future diminishes, because noticing that unpredictability is what alerts the consciousness to dissent rather than go along. But, oddly enough, you may not want everyone to be a dissident all at once. Because the average soul would not want to be a dissident, but rather beseech the regime to do something.
This is a profound paradox in how regimes and dissidents relate to each other. Paradoxically, a slow decline gives you time to select and train up better dissidents, whereas a rapid decline would merely advantage a regime. Thus, if you want to win, you have to let the process of decay and complacency continue until the regime becomes weak and incompetent, enabling an opposition to take over easily and peacefully.
However, I wonder if anyone will ever get the sense that, having taken power, they should arrange things to keep his administrators on their toes - that they never lose the ecosystem that granted them greater intelligence to boot.