Consciousness, the Crow’s Nest, and the Judo Throwing of Nature

The role of qualia in alienating life to motivate the taming of the wilderness

Photo by Pixabay, on Pexels

Perhaps nothing is as bizarre to a conscious agent as the agent’s awareness of being isolated by its consciousness.

Most things in the world aren’t conscious, according to the scientific theories that objectify them. This means that most things are counterintuitive to conscious beings that evolve to thrive in societies of fellow sentient beings. The intuitions of social animals are geared to making sense of their familial or tribal members, prey, or predators, not to fathom how objective things could exist and develop on a purely wild basis, with no help from a personal deity.

The more objective or strictly physical the bulk of nature is, the greater its ontological strangeness to conscious beings. The scientific basis of atheism in the era of absolute modernity, therefore, is liable to re-enchant nature by emphasizing its wildness, or its alien absurdity in being godless and impersonal.

But what’s at least as strange as the supremacy of nature’s mindless creativity is what philosophers call the “quale,” the fact that conscious organisms have such a subjective component. Why should a fundamentally and predominantly objective universe with no inner life or purpose have developed a spectrum of subjects that undergo experiences?

To some extent, we know how this evolution happened. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies the key to the substrate of consciousness, which is that the substrate must excel at integrating information. As one encyclopedia article summarizes the theory,

consciousness requires a grouping of elements within a system that have physical cause-effect power upon one another. This in turn implies that only reentrant architecture consisting of feedback loops, whether neural or computational, will realize consciousness. Such groupings make a difference to themselves, not just to outside observers. This constitutes integrated information. Of the various groupings within a system that possess such causal power, one will do so maximally. This local maximum of integrated information is identical to consciousness.

As we know from science, consciousness happens because of neural activity, and brains are knots of processors that convert sensory information into an electrical code, passed along as neuronal messages that somehow add up to shifting states of consciousness. The IIT contends that consciousness is just that abstract, mathematical property of being highly integrated information.

I’d suspect, though, that this integration of information is necessary but insufficient for consciousness. What must be added is an evolutionary role in confronting the existential problem of any living thing: What should a living thing do, given the wider natural environment’s absurdity concerning the organism’s evolved preoccupation with fulfilling its life cycle? The unconscious resentment of being “thrown” into this situation, as Martin Heidegger put it, lends urgency to the neural processes, and this urgency is crystalized as the alienation from the environment within a subjective standpoint.

A quale, as in the subjective aspect of a thought or feeling is like a ship’s crow’s nest that affords the subject a synoptic position.

A crow’s nest is a structure that sits atop a ship’s main mast and is used as a lookout vantage point. There’s likely no such physical structure in the brain, contrary to Rene Descartes who thought it might be the pineal gland. Rather, the entire brain is that structure, as it’s isolated from the environment and the rest of the body, acting as a control center, converter of signals, and modeler of options. But the subjective facet of a mental state is the mind’s intensified isolation, the sense of being nowhere and thus immaterial, a ghost that belongs to some supernatural realm.

Of course, there’s a vast spectrum of consciousness, based on the greater or lesser understanding of that existential condition, and most animals likely have only a dim appreciation of how they differ from their environment. For one thing, there’s a difference between consciousness and self-consciousness. First-order consciousness is the sensing of stimuli, whereas self-consciousness requires a more complicated brain, with a cortex for processing elaborate models of both outer and inner causes. These meta-processors wouldn’t likely evolve in species that aren’t adapted to apply this deep knowledge.

Thus, the difference between an animal and a person is that while animals may be conscious and even, to some extent, self-conscious (as in chimpanzees, elephants, and dolphins), animals can’t do much with an elaborate model of themselves, whereas people have both the brainpower to produce such models and the dexterity to put that model into action.

A person has a deeper consciousness than an animal in that the person is inherently more alienated from nature by her greater understanding of how her best model of herself clashes with her best model of nature.

For instance, a squirrel might experience qualia as a series of primal fears and pleasures. These are still cosmically bizarre in their subjectivity since the squirrel isn’t likely a zombie or a mere physical machine. These conscious states isolate the squirrel from its environment, driving this animal to discriminate in its bid to survive and thrive. Yet the squirrel acts to benefit not so much itself but its species, in prioritizing its genetically determined life cycle of eating, mating, seeking shelter, avoiding predators, and so on.

As we know from the difference between book learning and practical experience, organisms learn best not by downloading information like a computer, but by registering the information in that crow’s nest of subjective isolation, this being the ghostly series of qualia. You can be told not to touch a hot stove, but until you touch it and burn your hand, the lesson may not have been driven home.

Thus, a person learns about his or her personalized self and the environment, making for an epic clash of models that intensifies the person’s self-awareness. Rather than just fulfilling our evolutionary function as mammals or primates, we’re preoccupied with a culture that facilitates our fantasies, conceits, hobbies, and other such pursuits, all of which are frivolous in comparison to animal life. As Nietzsche and Freud explained, we “behaviourally modern” primates form selves as masks we wear to fit into society. These selves are mental tools that streamline our social relations; they’re brands we convey and ideals we prop up for judging and modifying our behaviour.

• First-order consciousness facilitates the genetic level of resisting nature’s wildness, acting as a mental refuge and motivator for pursuing a naturally selected, sociobiological course of action, as opposed to a physically necessitated one.

• Second-order consciousness facilitates more godlike and perhaps foolish or tragically heroic pursuits since people undertake more daring ventures, namely the conversion of every trace of wildness into an artificial playground that serves them. Whereas animals serve their genes in conformity to natural niches, people serve their modeled inner self and private, personalized ideals and goals, and they do so by creating or participating in synthetic, intelligently designed niches, such as artistic vocations or jobs in a capitalist economy.

This personal consciousness, too, comes in degrees, as in the difference between introverted and extroverted personalities. The more focused we are on our inner life because of the richer influx of sensory content per perception, the more self-conscious we’ll be in the existential sense, meaning that introverts are more prone to background feelings of alienation and appreciation of life’s strangeness. By contrast, extroverts are preoccupied with the external world because they must work harder to acquire information, given the narrowness of their perceptual bandwidths.

An extrovert’s sense of the world is more superficial than an introvert’s because the introvert is bombarded with significance and must therefore periodically retreat from engaging with the world, to avoid being overstimulated. By contrast, extroverts crave engagement because they understand less of what they sense. They make up for their lower quality of impressions by accumulating a greater quantity of them, and they do so by flourishing in social engagements or by prioritizing action rather than rumination.

At any rate, from a person’s crow’s-next of self-consciousness flows intelligent agency. Heidegger highlighted this pragmatic orientation, calling it what it’s like to “be there” with affordances at the ready. Unlike babies that have little if any understanding of what’s going on in their environment, an adult person relies on background knowledge to engage only indirectly with the stimuli. We deal not with “things in themselves,” as Immanuel Kant called them, but with things in so far as we mentally model them.

This is the daydreaming aspect of everyday life, as we engage with the world not in its existential strangeness (since doing so would be debilitating); rather, we interact confidently with what confronts us because we’re interacting largely with mental extensions of ourselves. Especially when carrying out our social functions, whether it’s fueling our car, crossing the street, reading a book, or saying hello to an associate, our behaviour is routinized and practically automated. These social interactions, too, are ghostly in so far as they depend on the enculturation of selves, and those selves in turn cast a mental net on the world, as it were, each node consisting of a concept or model that assimilates the unknown to intuitive understanding.

When you walk, putting one foot in front of the other, you don’t have to think about it because you’ve internalized this procedure. You’re immersed in the phenomenal rather than the noumenal environment; that is, you’re at home in the “lifeworld,” in the world as you’ve come to understand and intuit it.

In a natural disaster, though, or in some other anomalous reckoning, adults can be reduced to childlike states because they lack the training to react intelligently to this incursion. Their agency is compromised because their subjective isolation in qualia hasn’t prepared them yet for those circumstances, by motivating their investigations so they can learn to domesticate this fringe of nature’s strange wildness.

Some diseases that used to be harrowing are now routinely mitigated. Thus, the net of progressive human affordances widens, but that it’s cast at all is due to qualia, to the mind’s imagined isolation in a series of subjective states or, in more advanced cases, in a personal self that controls or at least recognizes both its objective conditions and subjective states.

I say “imagined isolation” not because qualia are unreal or fictive, but because the experience of subjectivity is supplemented by background knowledge, enriching the conscious state. This point is well-illustrated towards the end of the Pixar movie Inside Out, in the scene in which the sides of a teenager’s personality come together for the first time, making for a complex, bittersweet emotion.

In these respects, civilization is like a judo throw, with qualia at the center of our imagining of nature’s center of gravity. Conscious agents aim to tame nature, to convert wildness into a cultural code rather like how the brain converts sensory patterns into neural ones. Once converted by an act of model-based understanding, a society of minds applies that knowledge in an industrial fashion, using technology to physically re-engineer the wild environment.

We weaken nature by understanding its exploitable patterns, and we “throw” the wilderness, aiming to land on top of it, as it were, in our intelligently designed renderings, that is, in our models, worldviews, cultures, cities, nations, and empires.