Why Biology Has Been Minimized in Defining What is Consciousness

Executive Summary

• Coverage of consciousness has tended to be dominated by the social sciences.
• The basis of consciousness is evolutionary biology.

Introduction

What is clear from reading material on consciousness is that the fields of psychology, philosophy, and sociology loom much more significantly in the discussion of consciousness than biology.

The degree to which this is the case is brought to light when observing a biological explanation of consciousness, as can be found by watching the following video from Kurzgesagt.

Biological Basis of Consciousness

Very few people have an in-depth education in biology. And biology is very often taught from an isolated way — this is to prepare students for employable occupations rather than an integrated understanding. This is because most people that study biology at the more advanced levels are training for a job in medicine. Medicine is focused on fixing issues or treating conditions, not on answering questions such as how consciousness evolved. That is, medicine’s focus is solving problems that can be quickly monetized more than investing the time to improve understanding of biological systems. Medicine tends to speak in terms of “saving lives,” which is a responsive or reactionary orientation. The most extreme example of this would be the ER, but medicine overall has this orientation. This is why medicine also tends to de-emphasize prevention. It is very difficult to monetize prevention, and prevention reduces the market for reactionary medicine.

If we switch to psychology, again, the focus tends to be on psychological problems and how to remedy these problems. This, along with psychiatry, overlaps with medicine’s reactionary motivations and orientation.

Selecting the Correct Vantage Point

This has left people to try to understand their consciousness from within their consciousness. However, this is probably not the right approach as while it provides “first-hand experience” it is not sufficiently objective.

What Controls Biological Design

Organisms exist because they evolved to meet environmental pressures. What the video by Kurzgesagt so conclusively shows is that all of the conscious functions that we take for granted and see as part of “us” are built by evolution.

These are evolved areas that are related to obtaining resources or mating. When I was growing up, I would sometimes ask questions about why humans did this or that or were designed in particular ways. In retrospect, it is curious how infrequently a biological — rather than a societal or psychological explanation was given. My life in a way changed when I read the book The Selfish Gene, which explained the biological basis for so many behaviors and designs of humans. This knowledge was largely hidden from the people in my family — and this includes one medical doctor. Again, doctors study biology, but their courses do not have the orientation around evolutionary biology. Doctors quickly become a type of “auto mechanic” of the human body, and can normally barely keep up with the literature in their field much less think about larger biological questions.

The eye is a major sensory organ to consciousness — however, there is no single “eye.” Each animal’s eye is evolved to the environment and needs of its owner.

The origins of eyes began as far back as in bacteria, which they think evolved 500 million years ago. This is where they were simply primitive light receptors that could only perceive light or dark. 

The purpose of more advanced eyes being circular, or in the case of the flatwork, cupped, allows it to determine the direction of the incoming light.

The purpose of the eye being circular, say with mammals or fish, is to allow the eye to be a fluid-filled sack, which increases definition and light processing.

As this video points out, the evolution of the eye was accompanied by changes in the structure of the brain. Again, “consciousness” is inseparable from the connected sense organs.

The Vantage Point of Computation Science

It is not only sociology and psychology that overstates its understanding of consciousness, but computer science as well.

A significant problem holding back the development of AI has been that consciousness can be understood primarily from the model of a computer. We cover this in the article Who Was More Accurate, Marvin Minsky, or Hubert Dreyfus on AI?

The following quotation also explains this.

The whole history of AI has been promises that as soon as we get more computing power we will be able to do AI better. The old AI people were saying it. The people who want to make COG were saying it. And the illusion they follow they think well the brain does it and it’s got millions and millions billions and billions of neurons. So when we have billions and billions of “neurons” we’ll do it something like the brain does it. That is a gigantic fallacy. The brain is doing at several milliseconds per processing. The brain can’t process billions and billions of bits in millions of a second the way these supercomputers are going to be able to. So whatever the brain is doing to produce consciousness can’t possibly be what these super things are going to do to produce consciousness.(emphasis added) We don’t have any idea how the brain is doing it. One thing I think we can be sure about is the brain is not doing it by processing billions and billions of neural impulses. That just wouldn’t work. So the only example these people have of how these processes produce consciousness is not an example of how their type of processing produces consciousness. So why should be believe their kine of computer power would produce consciousness. – What Computers Can’t Do

Computer Scientists Overestimate Their Ability to Understand or Model Consciousness

Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor, argued that the answer to consciousness was modeled by neurobiology. However, his insights were ignored by computer scientists. Because computer scientists like Marvin Minsky were able to convince funders that they did have the answer on consciousness, the neurologists and their contributions were largely left out of the research into AI. Marvin Minsky continually promoted the concept that human consciousness worked as do computers.

Once again, computer scientists have tried to decompose consciousness with mathematics and computation, with the AI researchers continually proposing that consciousness would arrive as soon as computers became sufficiently powerful.

Conclusion

Both the social sciences and computer science and mathematics have attempted to overstate their applicability to understanding consciousness. Biology has tended to be focused on medicine, with people trying to monetize their biology education in the most efficient way possible. However, this has left many areas that are the province of biology to be encroached by other fields of study that do not have the domain expertise. For example, it is not common for feminists to say that sex is a social construct and does not exist in reality.

The more that biology is ignored, where its domain expertise extends (which is all living things), the more inaccurate conclusions will be developed by those who are not applying the correct category of knowledge.

References

*https://www.amazon.com/What-Computers-Still-Cant-Artificial-ebook/dp/B002XQ21X8

How the brain interprets sight. 

When damage occurs to various structures of the brain, the ability to use the visual system is impaired in specific ways. This shows the specific nature of the various structures of the brain. 

Without damage, the experience is seamless.

Animals just happened to evolve the ability to sense a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, that is converted by the brain into what we see. This is no “color” just a color that the brain converts a part of the visual spectrum into a color that we perceive. 

The visible light spectrum is the only electromagnetic wavelengths that propagate well in water, which is where eyes evolved.