Consciousness as a parasite

45 minutes long, but this is just too interesting not to summarise. I saw this in my feed a while back and bookmarked it for the occasion I had 45 minutes spare, but unfortunately I don't remember who shared it originally.

First we get a look at the possibility that ants are self aware. Apparently ants pass the mirror test. If coloured paint is applied to them, an ant seeing its own reflection will attempt to remove it. They don't try this if the paint matches their own colour, suggesting they really are responding to the visual information and not any itching or other stimulus from the paint, and that they distinguish their reflections from themselves. Self awareness ?

Watts is keen to note that this research was done by otherwise reputable scientists, appears to be rigorous and well-documented, but was published in a journal which looks for all the world like a spam/predator journal ("Journal of Science"). The site has a picture of a smiling guy wearing a hard hat for no reason, for God's sake. He notes that this is strange considering how easy it would be to replicate the study, which is more than I got after a quick Google (anyone want to dig deeper, please do). So this is interesting but suspicious.

Watts notes that there is other research being done on insect intelligence/consciousness. One group claims that consicousness is "rooted in the verterbrate mid-brain", but since all parts of the mid-brain have a function analogue in the insect brain, insects ought to be just as conscious. Other animals - parrots, octopus - have totally different brain structures but also seem to be intelligent. It's almost as though the shape of brain doesn't matter all that much, as long as it has enough synapses. He mentions Penrose and other more woo-variants of consciousness, but doesn't dwell on them.

Next he suggests a different way to tackle the problem is to ask what consciousness is good for. His answer is... nothing. We don't really need it, but we've got it anyway. He notes that brain scans show that the signal to wiggle our fingers is sent before we're consciously aware of it. The artist Lee Hadwin creates art - good, careful art - in his sleep, while being barely able to draw while awake; he also notes various cases of sleepwalkers doing all kinds of strange (sometimes criminal) activities while asleep. Perhaps most interestingly, he cites a study in which people were given a choice of cars to buy. One group was allowed to think about it for four minutes while the other group were given distracting tasks to do. The distracted group consistently made the better choice (assessed on 12 variables; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005).

Here I will interject briefly to say that I've long found it odd that I can think in complete, coherent sentences. It's like they're being assembled unconsicously, while my consicous mind is, almost, merely a witness. This doesn't mean I have no role to play, I simply have to redefine "me" to mean my entire self, including my subconscious. It's still me thinking and choosing to wiggle my fingers, just not always my consious self. My guess would be that there's an interplay between consicous and unconsious - some decisions are probably best made subconsiously, others are not. It would be interesting to hear more details about the car study, e.g. if having the car decisions in the back of their minds made the distracted group worse at the distracting task than they otherwise would... maybe the extra stimulation actually helped, maybe they were processing both consciously but intermittently and with more efficiency. Some problems seem to require flow while others are best solved with a fresh mind. So maybe they were constanly being distacted but constantly returning to it. Or maybe consciousness is indeed nothing more than a commentary on the subconsious, or something.

All that notwithstanding, Watts suggests that consciousness is a like a parasite. To its host, a parastite isn't useful at all - it's an accident, not an adaptation. He came up with this as the punchline for a sci-fi novel but now it's apparently being taken seriously by neuroscientists.

He goes on to describe a fascinating study in which researchers were able to create a "ratborg" - a rat hive mind - by linking four rats brains together (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27869-animal-brains-connected-up-to-make-mind-melded-computer/). He also cites the development of an artifical hippocampus for storing memories by Theodore Berger, though I think he greatly exaggerates the progress of this and other experiments.

Finally he goes on to describe the "hive mind" as being simply an extension of our existing brains. Individual sections of the brain function differently when integrated into the whole - it's like our personality is created from lots of sub-personalities. Watts describes "alien hand" syndrome, where suffers don't feel in control of their own hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome); a split-brain case where one hemisphere was Christian and the other was atheist (my very brief search couldn't find a nice impartial link); and how communication between the two brain hemispheres depends on the connection speed. There are different ways the two can communicate and the slower method results in behaviour differences, because the two halves are processing information effectively separately. He notes a patient who demonstrated a distinctly different personality while one half of his brain was anaethistised.

His last and perhaps most interesting example are the conjoined Hogan twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan) who share a double, joined brain. Apparently they can see through each other's eyes and sense when each other is being tickled and maybe even each others thoughts. They have distinct personalities, but use the pronoun "I" to refer to each other. Watts argues that in a true hive mind, the separate personalities become completely subsumed into a greater whole - a completely new individual arises from the component minds. He concludes with a note that while still highly uncertain, estimate of the communication bandwidth between the two hemispheres of the brain is to comparable to that of a mobile phone, and thus a hive mind is something we should start to be concerned about.

EDIT : Watts also asks if there's anything we do consciously that we couldn't do unconsciously instead. And maybe the answer is indeed "no", but... for it to have an evolutionary function, all it needs to do is make things easier for most people, most of the time. That, I think, is generally the case for memory. Once ideas crystallise out of their deeper subconscious construction, how much easier they become to remember ! And how much easier they become to store externally. It's well-known that short-term memory has powerful information processing capacity but can only hold a few - maybe seven or so - "items" at once, albeit "item" is somewhat ambiguous, whereas long-term memory storage is vast but slow. Items have to persist in short-term memory for some time before they even have a chance of making it to the long term storage, and this seems to require consciousness. It would be fascinating to see if anyone's done any studies on short/long-term memory in animals.

Artists drawing in their sleep are certainly interesting exceptions but by far and way they are not the norm, and therefore from an evolutionary standpoint may not tell us that much about consciousness : that it is possible doesn't mean it's easy. Also, I think it's important to note that consciousness, whatever it actually is, occurs in different states and levels. Is someone dreaming really unconscious ? What about lucid dreaming ? It's clearly a different state from a dreamless sleep. It may be that tasks Watts says can be done unconsciously are actually occuring on other levels. Consciousness certainly isn't binary.

I suspect consciousness is a bit like an interactive theatre, or, more appropriately, a pantomime. The audience both draw on information provided by the actors (existing memories) and influence the outcome of the play ("He's behind you !"). The stage hands behind the scenes are the subconscious. Sometimes you're better off letting them do the hard work, but sometimes the audience can spot things the actors and stage hands cannot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I