Consciousness is presently assumed to be extensively spread throughout nature. There's no denying that mammals and birds have feelings and experiences, and the sensation of pain must have originated early in development. Many creatures, including fish, reptiles, cephalopods like octopi and squid, and even insects, have a good claim to knowledge of a sensory world of flavors, smells, noises, and visual, tactile things and substances, as difficult as it is to fathom the experiences of a gecko or a spider.
Still, it may seem unbelievable that consciousness and all of our mental abilities, including as logical decision-making and creativity, as well as perception and sensation, could come from simply physical roots, from brain processes that follow physical and chemical principles. Individual parts – letters – can give rise to composites – words and sentences – with new features, as illustrated by the alphabet comparison. However, we may still be perplexed as to how awareness can provide us with a world of flavor, color, aroma, and sound from the ultimately true colorless, odourless, tasteless, and quiet particles and forces.
No one has ever scientifically explained how we may be conscious of a world and why we experience the characteristics we do - why the perfume of roses is as it is, and why specific wavelengths of light are associated with the sense of red rather than blue. No one has ever described how I can consciously and purposefully undertake an activity. Nonetheless, today's Epicurean wonders: which is more likely? That awareness and mentality come from merely physical bases, regardless of whether we can ever understand it or not? Or that a non-physical entity resides somewhere within us and, when correctly connected to a working physical brain, allows the brain's owner to think, feel, experience, and decide?
The topic of why conscious awareness is helpful is a more tractable question than 'How does conscious awareness arise?' Developing lungs or wings allowed prehistoric creatures to take advantage of certain aspects of their habitat, such as moving from the water to land, where there were new things to eat, or from land to air, where there were fewer predators. But how can having awareness, understanding of a world, and knowledge of how my body is linked to other bodies help me do something I couldn't if I were a well-programmed unconscious machine? This subject is particularly relevant, since robotics continues to improve and gain incredible recognition and navigation skills.
Consider the basic robot known as the Roomba to demonstrate why, despite technical advancements, awareness may be required for many living creatures. The Roomba is a 16-inch-diameter disk with two independently running wheels that is charged by plugging it into the wall. It then sweeps the crumbs and dust from your floor. It can 'shift course when it encounters impediments, identify filthy patches on the floor, and sense steep dips to prevent it from tumbling down stairs,' according to its literature.
The Roomba just has one job, but it does it well: it scour the house for dust and filth. Consumers desire and will pay for improved Roombas with fewer difficulties and greater capabilities, thus successive generations of Roombas evolve.
- It isn't a machine that converts raw materials into energy and labor, though.
- It does not run on the dust and dirt that it accumulates.
- It does not need to be self-sustaining because it can take an endless supply of power from the socket to refresh its batteries.
- It is completely reliant on its owner for continued operation, as it can become caught under furniture and lose power.
Now assume that we wish to develop a robot that forages for food outside on varying terrain rather than on flat interior surfaces for dust and dirt, and that this food is converted into the fuel that drives its motions. It now confronts hazards not only from the environment's jagged rocks and precipices, but also from heat, cold, and rain, which will damage its electrical components. It must stay away from non-food substances. Because the quantity of food it can discover, ingest, and metabolize for power is limited, it must be efficient in using its energy if it is to survive. This robot is a living being. It, like the Roomba, can simply wear down due to friction and rust. It can also 'die' if its energy requirements outstrip the quantity of food it can discover, ingest, and convert to energy, or if it fails to identify a fatal threat. It may also be attacked and killed by another robot, which could eat its carcass for fuel or new parts, or by an annoyed human.
With today's technology, this robot will have extremely complicated software. It must be able to distinguish between food and non-food that has a strong resemblance to food. It will require a memory to prevent spending energy exploring in areas where no food has been discovered recently, but some of these areas may become valuable food sources in the future, which it will need to remember. It will require sensors to monitor its energy demands in order to determine when to begin foraging and when to stop.
It will require a decision system capable of making key decisions, such as whether to continue searching for food even when its energy levels are so low that it may 'die,' or whether to cease the hunt to preserve energy and wait for food to replenish itself in the environment. Let's pretend the robot has the ability to reproduce. It will make replicas of itself that are somewhat different from the original. It must either create full-scale duplicates of itself or smaller variant versions that will increase in size as they devour food. If it's the former, it'll need a lot of energy; if it's the latter, new software will be required to guide expansion. A robot that exists amid other robots that are vying for the same food and housing, as well as to be the fastest creator of little robots, must be provided with superior abilities. If it's a sexually reproducing robot, it'll also need to be able to recognize potential'mates' and engage in wooing behavior that gets the other robot to comply.
It should be obvious by now that packing all of these capabilities into an unconscious machine running on chips the size of a Roomba, or into a unit the size of a mouse utilizing solely Roomba-type materials and structures, may be unfeasible from an engineering standpoint. The mouse is doing everything a Roomba does, but it isn't using Roomba-like materials and structures, and it is presumably aware of it.
The ability of the mouse to have experiences, to see, to recognize places and things, to remember locations, to make decisions, to choose mates, to feel the emotion of fear, which allows it to avoid cats and boots, and the emotion of love, which motivates it to care for its young while they are small, will allow it to be a productive and competitive organism. The mouse will not require the sophisticated electronics, enormous mass, and complexity that a foraging and reproducing robot would require if created with unconscious technology if evolution can tap into the principles of nature that make awareness possible.
It's inconceivable to conceive a human brain, a mushy, lobular structure with the consistency of oatmeal, forming sensations and thoughts. The situation is unlike, say, gazing at the liver, another soft, lobular structure, and wondering how it produces liver enzymes; no doubt someone can explain it. We do know, however, that the structured stimulation of the three trillion neurons in the average brain produces "the sense of what happened," as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it.
Perhaps this is performed by traditional physics and chemistry techniques, but there is a growing consensus that evolution has tapped into quantum mechanics. Why shouldn't organisms be able to use quantum mechanics to master some of life's challenges? If they can use hydrodynamics to swim and fly efficiently, and laws of action and reaction to push off from the earth in locomotion; if they can use photons to see and organize their circadian rhythms, why shouldn't they be able to use quantum mechanics to master some of life's challenges?
We have a tendency to think of awareness as an all-or-nothing proposition. We assume that either a conscious organism or an insensate machine experiences the world un the same way that I do. This, however, must be incorrect. There must be forms and degrees of awareness that are merely tangentially or barely like mine, as well as forms that are strikingly similar to mine.
If the nervous system evolved to coordinate movement, we can imagine that having just a little bit of conscious awareness – perhaps for pain or scent – could have given an early organism an advantage, and that nature continued to add on as new ways of gathering information from the environment through light, sound, or scent were invented, and new perceptual and emotional motivations aided with the tasks of living.
Philosophers and neuroscientists continue to dispute whether consciousness is an accident or an innate benefit, if it extends to invertebrates such as bees and oysters, and whether it is only found in creatures with sophisticated brains. The Epicurean can only watch these disputes with curiosity, never doubting that the mind is, at the very least, a natural phenomenon whose existence is reliant on the tiniest particles and subtlest forces of nature.