Bird Thoughts

This piece in the Atlantic is rambling and undisciplined, but the subject is one of great interest.

It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it....

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

If Chalmers is right, the evolutionary picture the author takes as "likely" is wrong. There is no 'first mind,' because consciousness is a feature of reality itself. The thing to explore is how consciousness is experienced by different forms of organization of this basic reality.

The author is also wrong (typically) in his description of the thoughts of the ancients and Medievals on the subject. This view Chalmers is advocating is quite ancient; it was Plato's opinion, and Plotinus' model. The name for it is panpsychism, and it happens to be my opinion as well.

Aristotle thought that discursive reason was a feature of the human soul, but not the animal soul. He did not thereby assume animals were 'unconscious automatons.' For Aristotle, three kind of souls 'stack,' as it were: plants have a limited capacity to sense the sun and turn towards it, and to distinguish nutrition and absorb it; animals have an additional capacity for locomotion in search of food, which grants a higher degree of consciousness. This is because you have to be able to recognize that the thing over there is different from you, and that you need to go over to it and eat it. The capacity to reason abstractly and discursively, however, Aristotle thought was an additional layer of capacity that only humans had.

Really, the opinion the author attributes to the ancients and Medievals is most properly an Enlightenment opinion. Kant seems to have thought something like that about animals. For him, access to the order of reason is the basis for the "integrat[ion] into a smooth, continuous world picture," which was a process Kant called "transcendental apperception." Thus, if animals lacked access to discursive reason, they couldn't be conscious because reason is what does the work on Kant's model.

As is often the case -- nearly always, I think -- we find that the ancients were closer to correct than the Enlightenment thinkers, the Moderns, and so forth. This whole period from Hobbes to Kant, from Newton to Hume, from around 1500 to today, someday our descendants will regard it as a useful detour from the path of wisdom. By exploring a whole new set of false ideas, we made some rapid advances toward what might really be true. In the end, though, we will return to the path the ancients laid out, but with a better set of models for how that path is actually realized.

Plotinus will ultimately prove to have been right about everything, I'll wager.