things to think about

In which Dawkins discusses how early replicators acquired themselves “survival machines” to “protect” them from other replicators, and, eventually move them around using legs, wings, fins and similar. He also suggests the origins of imagination, and, possibly, consciousness.

p59: Imagination as a threat-prediction mechanism. This is an interesting, and plausible idea. Once early brains could map their environment, the ability to pre-empt the movements of predators in that environment would be a useful mutation. From there it’s not a great stretch to imagine (ha!) how that ability could complexify into imagination as we know it.

p65: Communication & lying: indivisible? When a system of communication develops, those who abuse it can potentially gain an advantage. The example given here is a bird call which warns of a nearby predator. If a flock of birds is feeding and one of them makes this call, the flock flies away to safety. However, if there is no predator and an individual makes this call, it is free to eat as much food as it likes - its flock of competition has taken the call seriously and flown away. Interesting idea.

Overall Notes:Dawkins paints a picture of early brains being simple devices to fire off a sequence of muscular contractions on response to simple input - say, the sound of a nearby predator. Jacquard looms for nerve firing sequences. Is there a link to Straw Dogs and the Libet experiments here: the idea that most human behaviour being blind, unconscious reaction?

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I can’t help but feel here that there’s a possible argument for conscious life being the inevitable upshot of replicators, maybe even complex chemistry itself.

If I understand the argument correctly, single-celled organisms are the result of the same mindless replication/mutation/accretion of useful traits that brought about complex replicators in the first place. Therefore, complex organisms are a product of the same process (pp46-47).

A similar process could be said to have been at work in the rise of consciousness. A central controller of muscle contraction gains sensory response and memory, which evolves into spatial awareness and threat prediction and consciousness arrives at the point where a being factors itself into that spatial map of its environment (pp58-59). This all follows in the same mindless, logically inevitable track.

So, chemistry gives rise to replication, replication gives rise to organisms which gain an evolutionary edge through locomotion and its control, locomotive control is made more useful by memory and sensory awareness, consciousness happens as spatial awareness arises and becomes more complex.

I’m reminded of a podcast I listened a while ago with Rudy Rucker, who was channeling the ideas of Stephen Wolfram. Specifically, the idea of evolution as a self-organising process, rather than a fizzing battle of mutation. More here (skip to the paragraph entitled “An Abundance of Insights”).

I’m simplifying slightly here because it’s late and I’m tired, but I’m pretty sure the base argument is sound. Of course, there’s no reason to assume the resultant consciousness would be anything like ours.

It’s the morning now, I’ve had some sleep, and all this looks a lot more shaky. However, I’m leaving it here becuase I think it’s got some merit, just probably shouldn’t be taken totally seriously…

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There’s also links here to Ramachandaran’s qualia, which I’ve blogged about previously: the different stages of the evolution of consciousness could be likened to the different stages of qualia.

Finally, Dawkins makes an interesting suggestion in the chapter endnotes that serial, narrative consciousness as we know it is an illusion, produced as a side-effect of that consciousness arising through this “world+me” model of awareness. He makes the argument that the underlying processes of the brain are much more “parallel” in nature (a number of stimulus/responses operating simultaneously), and the linear way we experience the world is an abstraction, designed to make all that input managaeable.