The study of the nature of the universe happens at several different levels. Cosmology studies the universe at the macro level, Quantum Theory studies the universe at the micro level, and in between there are various ways to look at semi-closed systems: Anthropology studies the nature of Human social interaction, Biology studies the nature of living organisms, Chemistry studies the nature of atoms and molecules, etc. At each level of inquiry there are properties of the system that are not easily relatable or reducible to other levels: the properties are purely abstract artifacts of the particular level of inquiry, and thus have little to no meaning or application at other levels. Daniel Dennett gives an excellent example:
"...a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics." (Dennett 1992)
The center of gravity is an emergent property of a system. One could figure-out the center of gravity of a system by adding-up the centers of gravity of all disjoint subsets of the system, which means that the center of gravity property is reducible to the sum of its parts. Reducibility implies Supervenience, thus the center of gravity property of a system also supervenes on the subsets of the system. The property is thus to be considered by some to be weakly emergent (Bedau, 1997). Dennett goes on to say that the concept of self is analogous to the concept of center of gravity, that it is a purely abstract artifact, a center of conscious narrative. It is not readily apparent, however, if and how the self is reducible to constituent parts. Does the abstract property of self even supervene on the constituent parts? In other words, do the physical properties of the brain imply the psychological properties of the mind? Dualism is founded on the assumption that the self is not reducible to and does not supervene on its parts, i.e. the mind is not equal to the brain. But in order for the mind and brain to interact, does not supervenience at least have to hold? Do not changes in brain matter lead to changes in psychological state? If the supervenience of the mind on the brain does hold in the absence of the possibility of reducing mental phenomena to physical brain phenomena, then the abstract property of the self or consciousness is said to be strongly emergent.
Given these definitions of strong and weak emergence, it is tempting to see emergence everywhere and in everything. Everything that is a metric or a property that we measure is emergent from some underlying physical basis. The properties of structure and pattern that are observed in everyday objects like chairs and toothpaste are emergent. The properties of language that we use to communicate ideas with others and ourselves are emergent. Indeed, all conceivable formalisms are emergent, for the necessary abstraction involved in forming concepts must have some sort of basis that they are abstracted from; there can not be an abstraction without there also being a thing or set of things being abstracted from. The brain is a vehicle of abstraction, and the mind is the representation of this abstraction to itself, a multilayered automorphism of abstraction. All of conscious experience is an abstraction of some underlying reality, and the trick of science and philosophy is inferring through induction and deduction the properties of this underlying reality from the emergent abstractions of our conscious experience.
II. Is there a great distinction between strong and weak emergence?
David Chalmers claims that it is vital to keep the concepts of strong and weak emergence separate; weakly emergent properties do not challenge our currently accepted physical laws, whereas strongly emergent properties do:
"Strong emergence, if it exists, can be used to reject the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete. By contrast, weak emergence can be used to support the physicalist picture of the world, by showing how all sorts of phenomena that might seem novel and irreducible at first sight can nevertheless be grounded in underlying simple laws."
"...with the exception of consciousness, it appears that all other phenomena are weakly emergent or are derived from the strongly emergent phenomenon of consciousness." (Chalmers, 2002)
Does Chalmers mean to say that current physicalist models can account for all emergent properties except for consciousness, or does he mean that physicalist models can never even in principle account for properties of consciousness? It's telling that Chalmers claims that the only strongly emergent property that he can think of is consciousness, setting it alone on a pedestal above and beyond other emergent properties. This conception of consciousness as a strongly emergent property that is not representable with physicalist laws implies that it is as much or more fundamental than physicalist laws. Chalmers describes the property of consciousness as possibly having a downward causality, originally conceived by Donald T. Campbell:"all processes at the lower level of a hierarchy are restrained by and act in conformity to the laws of the higher level" (Campbell, 1974)
This seems to me to be a rather confused idea. What distinguishes higher level laws from lower level laws? Don't we presume the higher level to supervene on the lower level? How else do we construct a higher-lower hierarchy? I imagine Neurology would be considered to be lower level than Psychology, so according to the theory of downward causality, the neurological processes would be constrained by and act in accordance with the psychological processes. But if psychological properties are emergent in the way described above, then we know that many different neurological configurations and processes could lead to or map to the same psychological properties: different people with different brains and different neurological configurations can nevertheless sympathize and empathize and come to the same conclusions and become aware of the same phenomenal events, and we can imagine the biological neurons being replaced with non-biological neurons without there being a change in psychology; analogous is the many different configurations of matter that could map to the same center of gravity. So in what sense is the lower level constrained by the upper level? Does this not flip the order of supervenience? In what way is this relationship causal?
Causality as originally (and unfortunately) conceived by Aristotle was meant to answer the question "why?": (1) to what purpose (final cause), (2) from what means (material cause), (3) in what order of implication (efficient cause), (4) by what intent (formal cause). Science is mainly concerned with the efficient cause, or "cause and effect": if A, then B; if there is fire, then there is smoke. We want to know what we should expect when we have 'A'. Downward causality in cognition essential claims "if there is a certain mental process, then there is a certain configuration of neural firings". More importantly, the implication is that given a certain mental process, we should be able to predict a certain configuration of neural firings. What other implication could there be? Proponents of strong emergence and its corresponding mechanism of downward causality claim that it is impossible even in principle to arrive at or predict mental processes from neural firings, so clearly the converse must be true. But the converse is clearly not true, and even if it were, then in what sense would the mental processes be emergent?
Let's go back to the supposed irreducibility of strongly emergent properties. The distinction between weak and strong emergence is perhaps by orders of nested abstraction. The self may be strongly emergent in the context of neural analysis, but is it not weakly emergent in the context of memory? Does the self supervene on memory and is it reducible to memory? There are many examples of people losing their memory and consequently modifying their behavior out of character (Schacter, 1996). It is very clear that the notion of self and personal identity depends heavily on memory. If you were able to modify a person's memory and give them the recollection of murdering someone, then the person would suppose that she was a murderer. If you gave the person the memory of playing classical piano music with virtuosity at Carnegie Hall, then the person would suppose that she was a great musician. If you completely replaced this person's memories with your own memories, then wouldn't this person "feel" like she was you in some way? Perhaps the self is not completely reducible to memory, but certainly a large subset of mental processes comprised within the self are reducible to memory, and thus this subset of the self is weakly (not strongly) emergent from memory.
Memory is itself perhaps weakly emergent in the context of perception and experience, and so on and so forth. Following this chain of weak emergence, would it not be possible to thus reduce a supposedly strongly emergent property to an arbitrarily lower level of inquiry? In computer programming, high-level languages use nested class and metaclass structures to abstract complicated objects and algorithms from more basic machine instructions which are themselves abstracted from physical properties and structures of the computer. The behavior of any advanced program is thus emergent from the physics of the computer. Is this emergence strong or weak? We can't explain the behavior of the program (easily) in terms of switching transistors, and so it would seem to be strongly emergent. But on the other hand, we know that the behavior is reducible to transistors because that's how we designed it, which indicates that it is weakly emergent. In this interpretation, there is no great distinction between strong and weak emergence. If there is no great distinction between weak and strong emergence, then the implication is that there is no great distinction between Reducibility and Supervenience either. In the end, these distinctions may not be that important or useful. For now, I will assume that if A-properties supervene on B-properties, then A is phenomenally reducible to B, and thus all emergent properties are of the weak variety.
III. The mechanism of emergence.
What is the mechanism of emergence? How does emergence work? Are emergent properties fundamental and inherent in some way, or merely useful fictions as Dennett put it? Plato may be the earliest recorded thinker to tackle this issue. He devised a theory of Forms, abstractions that he presumed to be more fundamental than substance or matter. For Plato, these abstractions were the objects of reality, and perceptual knowledge was merely an illusion, the shadows cast by these perfect, ideal objects. One did not learn or come to know about the Forms, but rather one would "remember" the Forms from some place in the immortal soul. Was Plato onto something, or just on something?
Lets suppose there were no Humans or other conscious agents, for the sake of argument. Would there still be abstract emergent properties? This is not an easy question to answer. The natural logic and language of our minds has a physical basis in our brains, so these abstractions have a physical representation, and they are not represented to merely some hypothetical omniscient being but also to themselves. This is an important point. If we look, from an omniscient perspective, at a relatively random string of zeroes and ones represented by transistors in a computer, we can interpret it in near-infinite ways as long as we have a mechanism to decode the string for each way we want to interpret it. If we change the decoding mechanism, then we effectively change what the string represents. But does the string inherently represent anything in particular absent a mechanism to decode it, or does it represent everything that is possible for it to represent? Does any configuration of matter inherently have emergent properties absent some emergent property reading mechanism to interpret it? And what about that mechanism? What is its ontological status?
It is common and appealing to think of abstractions and emergent properties as existing in their own universe separate from the material world, as Plato did. And yet, the act of thinking about these things has a physical basis in the brain! When we write these ideas down on paper, they have a physical basis in the ink and paper. When we communicate these ideas to other people, we communicate them through physical media. We do not communicate them through some other immaterial universe. The ink on the paper and the syllables in the air do not pull abstraction and meaning out of the ether. Do our equations written in ink on paper have emergent properties? Is there a center-of-gravity emergent property, and a just-off-center-of- gravity emergent property, and a bit-more-off-center-of-gravity emergent property ...? Where does all of this meaning, abstraction, and emergence come from? Does emergence have any meaning outside of the mechanism used to discern/determine it?
The mechanism of emergence is homomorphic to the property of emergence. The property inheres in the mechanism, not in the physical basis of the property, and the mechanism can inhere in itself as an automorphic property. This may sound technical, but the concept should not be terribly difficult to grasp. We even have idioms that more or less express this very sentiment: "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "it's a matter of interpretation", "everything is relative". These all basically mean that emergent properties inhere in the mechanism of emergence; the mechanism of emergence is the source of emergent properties [1]. The mechanism itself is evolved. Lots of mechanisms get tried out, and only the ones most useful for survival and proliferation manage to propagate. These mechanisms are effectively sensual, perceptual, or extensions thereof. They also tend to compress higher dimensional data sets into lower dimensional data sets using lossy compression or perceptual coding schemes, as is the nature of abstraction. The more these mechanisms compress data, the more complex and higher-order these mechanisms must be [2].
[1: Note how this unintentionally jives with the Turing Test. (Turing, 1950)]
[2: Wikipedia has a good article about data compression, including a section about Machine Learning, which notes that data compression might be a good metric for general intelligence. Data Compression and Machine Learning are both extremely interesting topics in themselves, and have a lot to offer in the consideration of emergence, but they are beyond the scope of this paper. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression)]
IV. The necessary conditions of emergent consciousness.
In cognitive science, we are concerned with explaining the properties of the mind. The properties of the mind supervene on the brain, which supervenes on the nervous system, which supervenes on biology, and so on all the way down to the quantum level presumably. These properties are all emergent in some way, but how? What are the necessary conditions for the emergence of mental properties, or the emergence of any property in general? We already know that no individual neuron or even sets of neurons is necessary for consciousness. We also know that severely crippled senses does not prohibit the development of a conscious mind (see Helen Keller). People survive all sorts of traumatic brain injuries with a level of self-awareness intact. Even diseases such as Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIPD), which hinders the conduction of action potentials along the axons of neurons, do not prohibit self-awareness.
But people do lose consciousness temporarily sometimes, as in the case of syncope. Syncope is usually caused by insufficient blood flow to the brain. Neurons require oxygen to power their ion pumps, so if the blood does not supply enough oxygen to the brain, then the neurons can't function and the person loses consciousness. It seems obvious that consciousness depends on neurons being able to fire, but it also depends on the coherence of neuron firings. People who experience epileptiform seizures also lose self-awareness / consciousness. Even petit mal seizures, which are mildly manifested, cause a loss of awareness. These epileptiform seizures are a result of a massive amount of neurons firing all at once, during which time the person has no conscious control over her body or awareness of her surroundings. This makes sense since in order to respond to stimuli, one needs a mechanism of response through the neural network. But if the neural network is preoccupied firing in an incoherent or confounded way, then there is no way for the stimuli to produce a predictable response. There are other ways to lose consciousness through concussions and comas, the result of traumatic events in the brain, or through certain kinds of dementia and memory loss. In all of these cases, though, there must be some set of factors or elements in the brain being hindered that leads to a loss of consciousness. What are these things being lost that are necessary for the emergence of consciousness?
Let's say we have a normal person with normal mental properties. What would happen if we completely removed or froze the mechanism of memory? What would be the behavior of the person? We can imagine that perception would still work, meaning that there would still be sensory inputs into the brain. These inputs would activate some network of neurons, which would evoke a response from the person. But none of the preceding would change the synapses, or the weights of the neurons, or the neural network, and thus the exact same response could be evoked given the same sensory inputs. The person would be reduced to an automaton, perfectly predictable given a set of inputs. Would this person still have self-awareness? What mental properties if any would this person have? We could torture the person and evoke responses that might be interpreted as pained perhaps, but would there be any cognition of pain? If we plunged a knife into the person's hand, the person would have no recollection of the knife approaching the flesh, or of the knife penetrating the skin, or of any of the moments prior to the current perceptual indication that there is a knife in the hand. Any response to this event could only be reflexive, and not reflected upon. These considerations imply that some kind of memory is a necessary condition for the emergence of consciousness: the interpretation of sensory stimuli in the context of memory is a necessary condition for the emergence of consciousness.
What else is necessary for the emergence of consciousness? As I noted in section (III), emergent properties inhere in mechanisms of emergence, which I then claimed evolve and are perceptual in nature. Thus consciousness, being an emergent property, requires (self?) perception. If we hypothetically removed or confounded the perceptual information in the brain, then consciousness would cease to emerge, as in the case of epileptiform seizures. Even people who do not normally suffer from epileptiform seizures can lose consciousness from sensory overload. The evolutionary component of this point is also very important. Consider the fetus, infant, and toddler. How is consciousness emergent at these different stages of Human development, and how do we account for differences? Remember, consciousness inheres in the mechanism of emergence, which itself must evolve. The early stages of Human development do not have the requisite mechanisms of emergence evolved yet for higher cognition. Is that not why it is very difficult if not impossible for people to remember anything from those earlier stages of life? All memories from those early stages would be couched in terms of inferior and simplistic mechanisms of emergence, which become overwhelmed later on by the memories informed by more advanced mechanisms of emergence. The evolution of these mechanisms occurs through competition internal to the mind; new mechanisms get created, slightly modified from parent mechanisms, and the ones that are most successful are maintained, while the least successful get discarded (hopefully). Thus people gradually become more and more perceptive, making sense of things they weren't able to before, and sometimes seeing more than is really there (see a list of fallacies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies).
Memory and perception require a lot of hardware, complexity, and redundancy. There assuredly must be a minimum neurological requirement for the emergence of consciousness, and maybe there is a way to evaluate what that limit must be and in what terms. It would be an interesting problem to try to solve, but for the moment, the best we can do is note that the limit is there and leave it to bigger and better minds to figure out. As for other necessary conditions of consciousness, it is not readily apparent to me what they might be. Memory, perception, and neurological complexity are necessary, but may not be sufficient. Perhaps there is a limiting spatiotemporal component that is based on physical principles?
V. Concluding remarks.
Admittedly, this paper has merely provided a rough outline of the characteristics of emergence and its relationship to consciousness. My most important claim is that emergent properties inhere in the mechanisms of emergence, not in the physical basis of the properties. In this conception, these mechanisms that are the product of evolution should allow us to explain how knowledge is acquired and how language is developed, how children and machines learn, how rationality and cognitive dissonance emerge, how perception is extended, and how science progresses. I feel there is much explanatory power in this idea, and many testable predictions that it could make. Most importantly, this theory of emergence unifies ontologies, as opposed to others that separate the ontology of the mind from the brain; it opposes the dualism inherent in the distinction between strong and weak emergence, and the attendant implication of magical qualia of what it is like to be conscious.
VI. Bibliography.
Aristotle, "Metaphysics".
Bedau, Mark A. (1997), "Weak Emergence".
Campbell, Donald T. (1974), "Evolutionary Epistemology", in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Open Court, LaSalle, Il, 1974). Pp. 413-463.
Chalmers, David J. (2002) "Strong and Weak Emergence" Republished in P. Clayton and P. Davies, eds. (2006) The Re-Emergence of Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1992) "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity". In: F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson (eds.) Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Plato, "Meno", "Parmenides".
Schacter, D.L. (1996). "Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past". New York: Basic Books.
Tomberlin, J., ed., "Philosophical Perspectives: Mind, Causation, and World", Vol. 11 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 375-399.
Turing, Alan (October 1950), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Memory is itself perhaps weakly emergent in the context of perception and experience, and so on and so forth. Following this chain of weak emergence, would it not be possible to thus reduce a supposedly strongly emergent property to an arbitrarily lower level of inquiry? In computer programming, high-level languages use nested class and metaclass structures to abstract complicated objects and algorithms from more basic machine instructions which are themselves abstracted from physical properties and structures of the computer. The behavior of any advanced program is thus emergent from the physics of the computer. Is this emergence strong or weak? We can't explain the behavior of the program (easily) in terms of switching transistors, and so it would seem to be strongly emergent. But on the other hand, we know that the behavior is reducible to transistors because that's how we designed it, which indicates that it is weakly emergent. In this interpretation, there is no great distinction between strong and weak emergence. If there is no great distinction between weak and strong emergence, then the implication is that there is no great distinction between Reducibility and Supervenience either. In the end, these distinctions may not be that important or useful. For now, I will assume that if A-properties supervene on B-properties, then A is phenomenally reducible to B, and thus all emergent properties are of the weak variety.
III. The mechanism of emergence.
What is the mechanism of emergence? How does emergence work? Are emergent properties fundamental and inherent in some way, or merely useful fictions as Dennett put it? Plato may be the earliest recorded thinker to tackle this issue. He devised a theory of Forms, abstractions that he presumed to be more fundamental than substance or matter. For Plato, these abstractions were the objects of reality, and perceptual knowledge was merely an illusion, the shadows cast by these perfect, ideal objects. One did not learn or come to know about the Forms, but rather one would "remember" the Forms from some place in the immortal soul. Was Plato onto something, or just on something?
Lets suppose there were no Humans or other conscious agents, for the sake of argument. Would there still be abstract emergent properties? This is not an easy question to answer. The natural logic and language of our minds has a physical basis in our brains, so these abstractions have a physical representation, and they are not represented to merely some hypothetical omniscient being but also to themselves. This is an important point. If we look, from an omniscient perspective, at a relatively random string of zeroes and ones represented by transistors in a computer, we can interpret it in near-infinite ways as long as we have a mechanism to decode the string for each way we want to interpret it. If we change the decoding mechanism, then we effectively change what the string represents. But does the string inherently represent anything in particular absent a mechanism to decode it, or does it represent everything that is possible for it to represent? Does any configuration of matter inherently have emergent properties absent some emergent property reading mechanism to interpret it? And what about that mechanism? What is its ontological status?
It is common and appealing to think of abstractions and emergent properties as existing in their own universe separate from the material world, as Plato did. And yet, the act of thinking about these things has a physical basis in the brain! When we write these ideas down on paper, they have a physical basis in the ink and paper. When we communicate these ideas to other people, we communicate them through physical media. We do not communicate them through some other immaterial universe. The ink on the paper and the syllables in the air do not pull abstraction and meaning out of the ether. Do our equations written in ink on paper have emergent properties? Is there a center-of-gravity emergent property, and a just-off-center-of- gravity emergent property, and a bit-more-off-center-of-gravity emergent property ...? Where does all of this meaning, abstraction, and emergence come from? Does emergence have any meaning outside of the mechanism used to discern/determine it?
The mechanism of emergence is homomorphic to the property of emergence. The property inheres in the mechanism, not in the physical basis of the property, and the mechanism can inhere in itself as an automorphic property. This may sound technical, but the concept should not be terribly difficult to grasp. We even have idioms that more or less express this very sentiment: "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "it's a matter of interpretation", "everything is relative". These all basically mean that emergent properties inhere in the mechanism of emergence; the mechanism of emergence is the source of emergent properties [1]. The mechanism itself is evolved. Lots of mechanisms get tried out, and only the ones most useful for survival and proliferation manage to propagate. These mechanisms are effectively sensual, perceptual, or extensions thereof. They also tend to compress higher dimensional data sets into lower dimensional data sets using lossy compression or perceptual coding schemes, as is the nature of abstraction. The more these mechanisms compress data, the more complex and higher-order these mechanisms must be [2].
[1: Note how this unintentionally jives with the Turing Test. (Turing, 1950)]
[2: Wikipedia has a good article about data compression, including a section about Machine Learning, which notes that data compression might be a good metric for general intelligence. Data Compression and Machine Learning are both extremely interesting topics in themselves, and have a lot to offer in the consideration of emergence, but they are beyond the scope of this paper. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression)]
IV. The necessary conditions of emergent consciousness.
In cognitive science, we are concerned with explaining the properties of the mind. The properties of the mind supervene on the brain, which supervenes on the nervous system, which supervenes on biology, and so on all the way down to the quantum level presumably. These properties are all emergent in some way, but how? What are the necessary conditions for the emergence of mental properties, or the emergence of any property in general? We already know that no individual neuron or even sets of neurons is necessary for consciousness. We also know that severely crippled senses does not prohibit the development of a conscious mind (see Helen Keller). People survive all sorts of traumatic brain injuries with a level of self-awareness intact. Even diseases such as Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIPD), which hinders the conduction of action potentials along the axons of neurons, do not prohibit self-awareness.
But people do lose consciousness temporarily sometimes, as in the case of syncope. Syncope is usually caused by insufficient blood flow to the brain. Neurons require oxygen to power their ion pumps, so if the blood does not supply enough oxygen to the brain, then the neurons can't function and the person loses consciousness. It seems obvious that consciousness depends on neurons being able to fire, but it also depends on the coherence of neuron firings. People who experience epileptiform seizures also lose self-awareness / consciousness. Even petit mal seizures, which are mildly manifested, cause a loss of awareness. These epileptiform seizures are a result of a massive amount of neurons firing all at once, during which time the person has no conscious control over her body or awareness of her surroundings. This makes sense since in order to respond to stimuli, one needs a mechanism of response through the neural network. But if the neural network is preoccupied firing in an incoherent or confounded way, then there is no way for the stimuli to produce a predictable response. There are other ways to lose consciousness through concussions and comas, the result of traumatic events in the brain, or through certain kinds of dementia and memory loss. In all of these cases, though, there must be some set of factors or elements in the brain being hindered that leads to a loss of consciousness. What are these things being lost that are necessary for the emergence of consciousness?
Let's say we have a normal person with normal mental properties. What would happen if we completely removed or froze the mechanism of memory? What would be the behavior of the person? We can imagine that perception would still work, meaning that there would still be sensory inputs into the brain. These inputs would activate some network of neurons, which would evoke a response from the person. But none of the preceding would change the synapses, or the weights of the neurons, or the neural network, and thus the exact same response could be evoked given the same sensory inputs. The person would be reduced to an automaton, perfectly predictable given a set of inputs. Would this person still have self-awareness? What mental properties if any would this person have? We could torture the person and evoke responses that might be interpreted as pained perhaps, but would there be any cognition of pain? If we plunged a knife into the person's hand, the person would have no recollection of the knife approaching the flesh, or of the knife penetrating the skin, or of any of the moments prior to the current perceptual indication that there is a knife in the hand. Any response to this event could only be reflexive, and not reflected upon. These considerations imply that some kind of memory is a necessary condition for the emergence of consciousness: the interpretation of sensory stimuli in the context of memory is a necessary condition for the emergence of consciousness.
What else is necessary for the emergence of consciousness? As I noted in section (III), emergent properties inhere in mechanisms of emergence, which I then claimed evolve and are perceptual in nature. Thus consciousness, being an emergent property, requires (self?) perception. If we hypothetically removed or confounded the perceptual information in the brain, then consciousness would cease to emerge, as in the case of epileptiform seizures. Even people who do not normally suffer from epileptiform seizures can lose consciousness from sensory overload. The evolutionary component of this point is also very important. Consider the fetus, infant, and toddler. How is consciousness emergent at these different stages of Human development, and how do we account for differences? Remember, consciousness inheres in the mechanism of emergence, which itself must evolve. The early stages of Human development do not have the requisite mechanisms of emergence evolved yet for higher cognition. Is that not why it is very difficult if not impossible for people to remember anything from those earlier stages of life? All memories from those early stages would be couched in terms of inferior and simplistic mechanisms of emergence, which become overwhelmed later on by the memories informed by more advanced mechanisms of emergence. The evolution of these mechanisms occurs through competition internal to the mind; new mechanisms get created, slightly modified from parent mechanisms, and the ones that are most successful are maintained, while the least successful get discarded (hopefully). Thus people gradually become more and more perceptive, making sense of things they weren't able to before, and sometimes seeing more than is really there (see a list of fallacies, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies).
Memory and perception require a lot of hardware, complexity, and redundancy. There assuredly must be a minimum neurological requirement for the emergence of consciousness, and maybe there is a way to evaluate what that limit must be and in what terms. It would be an interesting problem to try to solve, but for the moment, the best we can do is note that the limit is there and leave it to bigger and better minds to figure out. As for other necessary conditions of consciousness, it is not readily apparent to me what they might be. Memory, perception, and neurological complexity are necessary, but may not be sufficient. Perhaps there is a limiting spatiotemporal component that is based on physical principles?
V. Concluding remarks.
Admittedly, this paper has merely provided a rough outline of the characteristics of emergence and its relationship to consciousness. My most important claim is that emergent properties inhere in the mechanisms of emergence, not in the physical basis of the properties. In this conception, these mechanisms that are the product of evolution should allow us to explain how knowledge is acquired and how language is developed, how children and machines learn, how rationality and cognitive dissonance emerge, how perception is extended, and how science progresses. I feel there is much explanatory power in this idea, and many testable predictions that it could make. Most importantly, this theory of emergence unifies ontologies, as opposed to others that separate the ontology of the mind from the brain; it opposes the dualism inherent in the distinction between strong and weak emergence, and the attendant implication of magical qualia of what it is like to be conscious.
VI. Bibliography.
Aristotle, "Metaphysics".
Bedau, Mark A. (1997), "Weak Emergence".
Campbell, Donald T. (1974), "Evolutionary Epistemology", in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (Open Court, LaSalle, Il, 1974). Pp. 413-463.
Chalmers, David J. (2002) "Strong and Weak Emergence" Republished in P. Clayton and P. Davies, eds. (2006) The Re-Emergence of Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1992) "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity". In: F. Kessel, P. Cole and D. Johnson (eds.) Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Plato, "Meno", "Parmenides".
Schacter, D.L. (1996). "Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past". New York: Basic Books.
Tomberlin, J., ed., "Philosophical Perspectives: Mind, Causation, and World", Vol. 11 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 375-399.
Turing, Alan (October 1950), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
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