Thoughts on consciousness
WIP sharing of my exploration at the intersection of consciousness and technologies.
In any parallel system with limited energy and resources available, competition will occur.
Through evolution, once the living system reach the point where competition occurs for the available energy, some heuristic will need to be developed. For example a sound intensity threshold triggering motion.
The sensory signals are perceived to trigger a motor action to move in space: grab a fruit, run from a predator, etc.
Once the set of heuristics is too large due to a broader range of possible actions produced by the efficiency of the set of heuristics, then the heuristics evaluations themselves become competing actors for the available energy in the system.
In appears intuitive that the next optimization evolutionary step could be to evolve some heuristics to choose the lower sensory heuristics (perception). In order for those higher level heuristics (cognition) to be evaluated, their inputs needs to be composed of: sensory streams with pre-evaluated lower consumption heuristics (perception) results, awareness of the energy available and most importantly, access to the set of heuristics available. Memory seems to be logically bound to this hypothesis of the evolutionary process. Memory effectively optimize the selection of the pre-evaluated heuristics results under similar states. Could the state in which all those inputs are available be consciousness?
Extending the sense of “I” through technology
If consciousness is the space in which perceptions are evaluated, we often get this sensation that we are in our head. Visual and audio signals are captured in the head as well as smells and taste which are all physically located close to each other for low latency processing and to reduce the energy consumption.
Through meditation and by adopting different perspective on the awareness of that sensation of being in your head, such as beautifully described in On Having No Head by Douglas Edison Harding, one can extend the sensation of being in is head to be in your entire body. The “I” therefore gain space in the relationship one entertain with its environment. After all the nervous system has ramification across our entire body.
When you become fully aware that your consciousness and thus this feeling of being you is intricately tied to your percevable environment, one can also extend the sense of “I” to that environment. What we think about ourselves and the world is highly dependent of our current perceptions and thus the environment we’re in. If we could project ourselves instantaneously in a very different environments, it would greatly impact our conscious state of course.
Through the limited energy resources available, we would then evaluate the heuristics to take action which would then refine or even define our future selves.
To be continued…
Ideas to explore:
- Evolution might have created consciousness to cope with a lack of energy to process all signals.
- Signals are increasing exponentially (information).
- How technologies can provide signals representations that are energy efficient.
- How energy efficiency relates to dopamine and H&N molecules.
Note: I’ve not studied this subject so it is highly probable that this has been refuted or confirmed already. If so and if you have a minute I would highly appreciate if you could share some references in the comments or any good books/videos!
