SEQ_580 // STATUS: LINKED
If they don't, then maybe they hail from Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will102 instead. Less ambitious, far more accessible, Wegner's book doesn't so much deal with the nature of consciousness as it does with the nature of free will, which Wegner thumbnails as "our mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did.". Wegner presents his own list of syndromes and maladies, all of which reinforce the mind-boggling sense of what fragile and subvertible machines we are. And of course, Oliver Sacks103 was sending us memos from the edge of consciousness long before consciousness even had a bandwagon to jump on.
It might be easier to list the people who haven't taken a stab at "explaining" consciousness. Theories run the gamut from diffuse electrical fields to quantum puppet-shows; consciousness has been "located" in the frontoinsular cortex and the hypothalamus and a hundred dynamic cores in between104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114. (At least one theory115 suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic).
But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. [Blindsight] plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconcious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations116, 117, 118. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.)
Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective119. Norretranders declared outright that "Consciousness is a fraud"120.
Art might be a bit of an exception. Aesthetics seem to require some level of self-awareness—in fact, the evolution of aethestics might even be what got the whole sentience ball rolling in the first place. When music is so beautiful if makes you shiver, that's the reward circuitry in your limbic system kicking in: the same circuitry that rewards you for fucking an attractive partner or gorging on sucrose121. It's a hack, in other words; your brain has learned how to get the reward without actually earning it through increased fitness122. It feels good, and it fulfills us, and it makes life worth living. But it also turns us inward and distracts us. Those rats back in the sixties, the ones that learned to stimulate their own pleasure centers by pressing a lever: remember them? They pressed those levers with such addictive zeal that they forgot to eat. They starved to death. I've no doubt they died happy, but they died. Without issue. Their fitness went to Zero.
Aesthetics. Sentience. Extinction.
And that brings us to the final question, lurking way down in the anoxic zone: the question of what consciousness costs. Compared to nonconscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive123. (The premise of a separate, faster entity lurking at the base of our brains to take over in emergencies is based on studies by, among others, Joe LeDoux of New York University124, 125). By way of comparison, consider the complex, lightning-fast calculations of savantes; those abilities are noncognitive126, and there is evidence that they owe their superfunctionality not to any overarching integration of mental processes but due to relative neurological fragmentation127. Even if sentient and nonsentient processes were equally efficient, the conscious awareness of visceral stimuli—by its very nature— distracts the individual from other threats and opportunities in its environment. (I was quite proud of myself for that insight. You'll understand how peeved I was to discover that Wegner had already made a similar point back in 1994128.) The cost of high intelligence has even been demonstrated by experiments in which smart fruit flies lose out to dumb ones when competing for food129, possibly because the metabolic demands of learning and memory leave less energy for foraging. No, I haven't forgotten that I've just spent a whole book arguing that intelligence and sentience are different things. But this is still a relevant experiment, because one thing both attributes do have in common is that they are metabolically expensive. (The difference is, in at least some cases intelligence is worth the price. What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?)
While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superiority, a thousand years ago: if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.
[Cunningham]'s stats about self-recognition in primates: those too are real. Chimpanzees have a higher brain-to-body ratio than orangutans130, yet orangs consistently recognise themselves in mirrors while chimps do so only half the time131. Similarly, those nonhuman species with the most sophisticated language skills are a variety of birds and monkeys—not the presumably "more sentient" great apes who are our closest relatives132, 133. If you squint, facts like these suggest that sentience might almost be a phase, something that orangutans haven't yet grown out of but which their more-advanced chimpanzee cousins are beginning to. (Gorillas don't self-recognise in mirrors. Perhaps they've already grown out of sentience, or perhaps they never grew into it.)
Of course, Humans don't fit this pattern. If it even is a pattern. We're outliers: that's one of the points I'm making.
I bet [vampires] would fit it, though. That's the other one.
Finally, some very timely experimental support for this unpleasant premise came out just as Blindsight was being copy edited: it turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind134. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”135
Miscellaneous Ambience (Background Details, Bad Wiring, and the Human Condition)
The child [Siri Keeton] was not unique: we've been treating certain severe epilepsies by radical hemispherectomy for over fifty years now136. Surprisingly, the removal of half a brain doesn't seem to impact IQ or motor skills all that much (although most of hemispherectomy patients, unlike Keeton, have low IQs to begin with)137 . I'm still not entirely sure why they remove the hemisphere; why not just split the [corpus callosum], if all you're trying to do is prevent a feedback loop between halves? Do they scoop out one half to prevent alien hand syndrome—and if so, doesn't that imply that they're knowingly destroying a sentient personality?
The maternal-response opioids that [Helen Keeton] used to kickstart mother-love in her damaged son was inspired by recent work on attachment-deficit disorders in mice138. The iron-scavenging clouds that appear in the wake of the Firefall are based on those reported by Plane et al.139. I trawled [The Gang of Four]'s linguistic jargon from a variety of sources140, 141, 142, 143. The multilingual speech patterns of [Theseus]' crew (described but never quoted, thank God) were inspired by the musings of Graddol144, who suggests that science must remain conversant in multiple grammars because language leads thought, and a single "universal" scientific language would constrain the ways in which we view the world.
The antecedent of [Szpindel]'s and Cunningham's extended phenotypes exists today, in the form of one Matthew Nagel145. The spliced prosthetics that allow them to synesthetically perceive output from their lab equipment hails from the remarkable plasticity of the brain's sensory cortices: you can turn an auditory cortex into a visual one by simply splicing the optic nerve into the auditory pathways (if you do it early enough)146, 147. Bates' carboplatinum augments have their roots in the recent development of metal musculature148, 149. Sascha's ironic denigration of TwenCen psychiatry hails not only from (limited) personal experience, but from a pair of papers150, 151 that strip away the mystique from cases of so-called [multiple personality] disorder. (Not that there's anything wrong with the concept; merely with its diagnosis.) The fibrodysplasia variant that kills [Chelsea] was based on symptoms described by Kaplan et al.152.
And believe it or not, those screaming faces [Sarasti] used near the end of the book represent a very real form of statistical analysis: Chernoff Faces153, which are more effective than the usual graphs and statistical tables at conveying the essential characteristics of a data set154.