Ep 37: Loading the Dice (Eva Jablonka and Moncy Ginsburg)
Eva Jablonka
Moncy Ginsburg
What forms of consciousness exist in the natural world? What roles did associative learning and episodic like memory play in its origins? Does consciousness have a function, and is it an adaptation?
On this episode of Big Biology, we speak with Eva Jablonka from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv, and Moncy Ginsburg, a neurobiologist formerly from the Open University of Israel, about their book called "The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul." We discuss how Universal Associative Learning led to the evolution of consciousness.
Cover photo: By Anna Zeligowski
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AW = Art Woods
MM = Marty Martin
MB = Matt Blois
JH = Jason Hagani (Student Spotlight)
ML = Mike Levin (outro)
EJ = Eva Jablonka
MG = Moncy Ginsburg
MB: This is Big Biology producer Matt Blois. We have another Student Spotlight coming your way, this time from Jason Hagani.
JH: Hi, my name is Jason Hagani, and I'm a first-year master’s student at Columbia University. Right now, you're probably enjoying a photo of me staring lovingly at a turtle, who was definitely a lot less excited about that encounter than I was. As an undergraduate, I used radio-telemetry to track 27 wood turtles in Connecticut. My research on their home ranges and movement patterns is now being used by a nature preserve to help protect the population of the endangered species. While I started small, my fascination with the spatial distribution of the natural world has inspired my current work, modeling the interactions between people and large predators to map areas of human-wildlife conflict in the American West. While many of us love animals like wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions, to those who live with them, they can be incredibly damaging. In the future, I hope to use an interdisciplinary approach which combines ecological research, social sciences, and visual arts to help people and wildlife better coexist.
MB: Thanks for sending that in. Students, tell us about the interesting research you're doing. Send a one-minute voice memo to info@bigbiology.org, and you might hear it on the show. Here's this week's episode.
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01:22
MM: More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle called the soul the principle feature of life.
AW: Aristotle believed that all living things have souls. He described a hierarchy of souls with plants at the bottom, animals in the middle, and humans at the top.
MM: The soul of a plant, he thought, drives it simply to grow and reproduce. The soul of an animal is more sophisticated. Aristotle believed that animals have sensitive souls -- souls that experience and help them make sense of the external world.
AW: The soul of a human has even more abilities. We have rational souls that can also think and reason about the world around us, which enables us to construct narratives about our lives.
MM: Unlike Plato, who viewed the soul as separate from the body and thought that it resided as a temporary tenant, Aristotle viewed the soul as intimately connected with the body, playing important roles in our daily lives.
AW: Aristotle's conception of souls sounds a lot like modern ideas about consciousness, and in fact, his writings on the connection between bodies and souls have influenced science and philosophy for thousands of years.
MM: Aristotle was also a major source of inspiration for the philosopher and geneticist Eva Jablonka and neurobiologist Simona (or Moncy) Ginsburg. Last year, they published a book called "The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul," which lays out one of the first synthetic theories about how consciousness evolved.
AW: When Moncy and Eva surveyed the natural world, they found a hierarchy similar to the one identified by Aristotle. Some organisms have no subjective experiences, whereas others have rich ones. Most species lie somewhere in between.
MM: To understand the nature and origins of consciousness, they thought that they should focus on evolutionary transitions between different kinds of experience. Here's Eva.
EJ: We want to understand minimal consciousness. We want to understand how we believe that the conscious mode of being evolved from a non-conscious mode of being, that there were creatures who were alive and probably very complicated in many ways and had complex life, but they did not experience, and at some point, experiencing evolved.
AW: Eva and Moncy argue that learning, and especially one kind of learning called unlimited associative learning holds the key. Here's Moncy.
MG: What associative learning makes possible, it enables animals to learn about these contingent relations during their own lifetime. With animals that do not learn by associative learning, this is not possible.
MM: On this episode of Big Biology, we talk with Eva and Moncy about how consciousness evolved, different forms of consciousness in the natural world, and what to expect about the consciousness of AIs and ETs.
AW: I'm Art Woods.
MM: And I'm Marty Martin.
AW: You're listening to Big Biology.
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04:18
AW: So, you guys took, you say in the book, about ten years to write the book, which is you know, clearly an extended, extended process. Given the magnitude of the book, I'm almost surprised it was that short. But but just tell us about the process. So, so, how did you put this together over the course of a decade?
MG: Well I think, you know, we first of all, we met every Thursday, we used to meet for a whole day. We cleared this day. We used to go to the market also in the middle of it to have a good meal, because we believe that this helps ideas sort of fly. So, we talked a lot and we read a lot. The book took ten years to write, but we started talking about it before that. We are talking already 16 years.
MG: I think it's also important to say that we didn't think we would write the book at first. After we had some pretty good ideas, every time we had a good idea and what would we call it, Eva?
EJ: We said well, we laid an egg. So, we did lay several eggs, and we did publish several papers. Actually, one of our best papers I think was rejected what was it, three or maybe four times before it was published. And then, we got fed up and said, maybe this is the time to sit down and write a detailed book with all the foundations and with no referees meddling in the process.
AW: Say what you want, yeah, in full, that's great.
MM: We want to spend most of the time I think talking about your ideas specific to UAL. But first, if we can go through a little bit of the history of theories of consciousness, and especially where the field stands right now, the sort of favored conceptions of consciousness.
06:30
EJ: Yeah. I think that maybe the way to describe in a short fashion the state of affairs now, we have to refer to the hard problem. The hard problem can be viewed in many ways. You can ask, why is consciousness needed? Can't we process information without the phenomenological aspect of it? Why is this sentience of this subjective experience needed? According to David Chalmers who coined this phrase, what we have be dealing, we scientists have been dealing with so far, were what he calls the easy problems, the easy problems of how information is processed. But the real problem, the hard problem, is why do you need this phenomenological layer? In other words, why do we have this sense of blueness or redness when we process certain wavelength? So, I think the, the, one of the biggest controversies among biologists today, natural biologists who study consciousness is whether this is a real problem or not, the hard problem.
MG: And if it is real, what kind of problem is it? I mean, real in the sense that I mean, that we do not think that consciousness is an illusion, that when we see blue, this is an illusion, or that when I feel pain, this is an illusion. We don't think this is an illusion. But on the other hand, we also don't think that it is something beyond and above the physiological processes that are happening in our, in our...
AW: Right, it's understandable, it's sort of a mechanistic and physical level.
MG: Yes, yes. We don't think this is, that this is something beyond it, in the same way that we don't think that the living being is an illusion, or though the living being is also not something that is above and beyond the chemical and biological, the processes that are going on, the chemical processes that constitute it. So, for us, the question is a constitutive question. It is a very difficult problem, but it is not hard in the way that Chalmers would put it.
EJ: Right.
MG: It is not something that is completely disconnected from the cognitive and the biological. It is constituted by the cognitive and the biological, and the questions are.
AW: So, would you say that Chalmers would have said that subjective experience and the hard problem is sort of an emergent process, if we can use that phrase emergent from sort of other...
EJ: No no no. We would say it's an emergent thing, but he would say that we have no explanation for it. The only explanation can be that it's, it is a primitive. You need another primitive in physics, if you wish, like mass, like energy, and that is consciousness. That is what he would say. We, on the other hand, we say that consciousness in a way is an emergent property of a very complex system.
10:33
MG: We don't think you need something, we don't think you need another primitive, in other words. He does. Chalmers is a dualist, that's what he is, I mean that's how he defines himself.
MM: So, it, I think, I've never heard it articulated this way, and given, I'm not really all that versed in the consciousness literature, but it sounds like he comes from a biological perspective that understanding consciousness as an adaptation, the subjectivity part, it really doesn't make sense. Am I getting that right? And so, if that part is at least along the right track, what's the logical jump to if that's not the case, if we can't understand it biologically then it must be a primitive?
EJ: You have to make certain assumptions about the physical world, and in order to, he would argue that in order to understand the world, for example in the 19th century, whenever electricity was found, electricity was discovered, and laws that are related to electricity were discovered, and this made sense of a lot of phenomena in the world. He thinks that the phenomena that are related to consciousness, you cannot make sense of them by using biology. You can't, you simply cannot. There is something that alludes you all the time, and in order to make sense of it, you need to rethink physics, to rethink the very basis of the way in which we see the world. This is what he thinks. We disagree. We think that what you need is a very very good understanding of biology and a very very good understanding of evolutionary biology.
MG: If I may add, I think that Chalmers, unlike other philosophers, thinks that consciousness is real, it is not an illusion. And since biology cannot explain it, that is why he turns from messy biology, that's what he calls it more or less, to physics.
EJ: Elegant physics.
AW: Dispense with some of the complications.
MG: But he thinks, he thinks it's real. He does not deny the existence of consciousness, okay?
EJ: No, he's a dualist, I mean, and you have other people who are panpsychist who believe that consciousness is everywhere...
MG: Everything, everything is conscious.
EJ: ...everything is conscious, so...
AW: So, if we had, let me just step back and ask a, maybe a straightforward but hard question, I think. So, according to you, what is consciousness?
13:24
EJ: So, according to us, I think we would say that consciousness is a particular dynamic, dynamics, cognitive and bodied dynamics of living organisms. I think it is a property of an organism. It's a creature thing, that's something that belongs to a creature and this creature is embodied. What its embodiment, what form its embodiment takes, what does it mean to be embodied, is a very difficult question. There are many answers, and there are several answers to it. But this is what we think. So, the question is what kind of living dynamics, cognitive living dynamics, embodied dynamics, physiological, neurophysiological embodied dynamics, it's not just neuro, can explain that this mode of being, this type of biological being that we call conscious being. This is how, so, for us, this is it. So, it is something that is constituted by all of these biological processes. And the question is, and now the question is what is it? Our staff called it, called it the sensitive soul, this dynamic.
AW: The subtitle of your book, yeah.
EJ: Yes. The title of the book, "Evolution of the Sensitive Soul," yeah. And he called it the sensitive soul. And we want to understand what this sensitive soul entails. What does it mean to say that? How can we describe it? How can we get even to start to, to understand how to, to get to it? This was our first problem. How do you tackle such a very difficult question? Because we, we were very very aware of the face that consciousness is a, is a mode of being. And it's, it's a, you know, and in the same way that we have to think about life, we have to think about life, living creatures are very very different, they have a different mode of being from non-living creatures, from rocks for example, from cups of tea, about living that we can talk, that we can think about as a mode of being, and then, and there is something about consciousness that makes, that is a particular type of life that is very different from the life of non-conscious animals.
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16:06
EJ: So, you asked us what, in what way our ideas were different from the ideas of other people?
MM: Yeah, yeah.
EJ: So, a lot of other, many people work on consciousness, what they do is they compare conscious and non-conscious state. For example, people who are under deep anesthesia to people who are coming out of anesthesia and people who are awake. When do people lose consciousness, and when they don't what kind of brain lesions lead to loss of consciousness, and what kind of brain lesions do not lead to, to loss of consciousness? And from these kinds of comparisons between conscious and non-conscious states, they try to construct a picture of what consciousness is about at the neurophysiological level. And that's very good, and this is information that we need, that we have made use of it, but our question is different. Our question was we want to understand minimal consciousness. We want to understand how, how we believe that the conscious mode of being evolved from a non-conscious mode of being, that there were creatures who were alive and probably very complicated in many ways and had, had complex life, but they did not experience, and at some point experiencing evolved. So, if we can catch the transition to experiencing, then we said that it will be very very important. We can figure out a lot of things. For example, it is important because it, they very early, the first, the first creatures, the earliest creatures that we could identify, that are conscious will not have all these evolved structures and evolved processes that came very much later. So, we will not be misled by this. We will see the very basic principles, and since we, since most of the studies that other people have done have been done on animals, on mammals, and mainly on humans, when this, and we don't think that this is the whole story, that this is the only kind of creatures that are conscious, then this kind of when we are looking at this transition, the transition to consciousness, we may identify very very much earlier evolutionary stages, and we can understand what kind of creatures are likely to be conscious, because we will know when this whole thing started, so, this is one reason that the, that this sort of, it can help us answer a lot of questions about the distribution of consciousness for example, about the basic mechanisms that were in place.
AW: Eva and Moncy told us that while researching the evolution of consciousness, they were inspired by the work of biologists like John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary, and Tibor Ganti, who studied the origin of life.
MM: Ganti, a Hungarian chemist, came up with a theory to describe the most basic form of life. He argued that the earliest forms of life would have three characteristics: metabolism, self-replication, and some kind of barrier separating life from the outside world.
AW: Moncy and Eva wanted to find similar kinds of essential markers for the most basic form of consciousness.
19:30
EJ: So, at first, so, we started by making a list of the kind of properties and features that most people, philosophers, phenomenologists, cognitive biologists, neurobiologists, people who talk and deal with consciousness would agree that if you find some, an entity with this list of, of features, yes it is likely to be sentient. So, we spent a happy year doing this, and we're having a list of all these properties, and then we started to look very systematically for some kind of a marker.
MG: When we looked for this transition from a non-sentient to a sentient animal to minimal consciousness, we searched in many directions. We started by searching for anatomical and structural differences between animals that have subjective experiences and those that do not. We looked for major differences in nervous systems. We looked even for molecular differences, if you remember.
EJ: I do!
MG: And most of these avenues were dead ends. We couldn't put our finger on a molecule. We found that even in non-neural animals, important molecules that figure in, in neurobiological processes appear also. The same macromolecules serve their different functions. So, we found, the only thing that we really found made a difference was a centralized nervous system. We'll come to that probably later. But one thing that we felt that we did lay an egg in, on, was learning. I think this is something very special in our approach, the focus on learning. I don't think that anyone else took this type of behavior as a marker.
EJ: And the marker that we found that satisfied us was this what we called unlimited associative learning.
MG: It started though with associative learning itself as an opener, as a game changer.
EJ: Yes.
AW: Right, and then only later did it become unlimited and as a marker? Okay, so maybe let's start with defining what is associative learning?
EJ: Yes. So, associative learning is basically when you can make, you can associate either two stimuli in the world, so, one can predict the other, or you can associate an action with an outcome. So, if you do something, you'll get a reward or a punishment or you'll get nothing, right? And when, when we're thinking about two stimuli in the world, the one stimuli which predicts another stimulus, so, it can be a completely neutral stimulus, you hear something, some buzz, and then suddenly you get food, or there is a wonderful smell of a steak.
AW: The microwave dings, and the coffee is hot, yeah.
EJ: Right? Exactly, yes, exactly that. So, for example, a little mouse can learn that it, it needs to press a lever in order to get food, or that it needs to avoid a lever, pressing a lever, in order to find food, and many many many variations on the thing.
MG: If I may add, what is the importance of associative learning? Before we even talk about unlimited associative learning, just simple associative learning. What associative learning makes possible, it enables animals to learn about these contingent relations during their own lifetime. With animals that do not learn by associative learning, this is not possible.
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24:16
AW: So, so, let's circle back to so, what does unlimited mean in this context of associative learning?
EJ: So, unlimited again is not mathematically unlimited, but there are three things that we, it's unlike the simple associative learning. What you perceive are complexes, and you can discriminate between things that have the same component, but they are organized in different ways. So, think about a picture which has certain elements in it: a house, a tree, a little road, a dog, and so on, yes? A little picture like that, and these elements can be organized in very very different ways. If you have what is, an animal that has, that has the ability, an animal with UAL, with unlimited associative learning, can discriminate between such pictures. It can discriminate between the same elements organized in different ways, and it can give different value to different configurations. It is called in behaviorist, in behaviorist language, configurational learning, configural learning, or non-elemental learning. So, you don't just learn the elements...
AW: Yeah, so, it's not just simple stimulus and response, it's how the stimuli are arranged in relation to one another.
EJ: Arranged and the arrangement is very very important. You can discriminate between different arrangements. This is the first thing. The other thing is that this complex stimulus is not innate. It is not for example something like a face, which is also a complex stimulus, but it may be that we already have an innate response to something like that. It is completely new. It has never been seen neither, it has been seen by the organism. It is not embedded within the nervous system already, so it is new. So, you cannot say that you are responding because you have an innate response. You cannot. And you, as we said, as I said, it is something that you can discriminate between different configurations. And the third thing is that you can build on, once you learn something like that and you learn that it is good or bad, then you can use this as the, as the reward and learn something else on the basis of what you have learned already. So, for example, if I, you can learn that sweets are very very nice and you love them, yes? That this kind of, particular kind of sweet with I don't know, a lollipop, is lovely. And then you learn that money can buy you this lollipop, so, now that if you have money and you do something, this money will buy you the lollipop. So, money is now important for you, right? So, it's a second, second order kind of learning. And some animals can do it, and certainly humans can do it, and can do more than second order in fact, but this ability to build on top of what you have learned and use what you have learned as the basis for what you will learn in the future, is another way of opening up the space of possibilities of learning possibilities for an animal. And we say that it is unlimited associative learning, because if you have these properties, so, you learn about new compound complex kind, and you can discriminate between compound things in the world and also, it involves also your own actions. You can see the difference between a particular way in which you behave and although the same movements can be involved in both, in both cases, in two different cases, in one case this will lead to a prize, in another case it will lead to a punishment. And so, you can learn all these kinds of things, and you can build, and they can be the basis of further learning. So, this is UAL. Now, it doesn't sound particularly complicated, but when we looked, and again we spent another happy year looking at the literature about learning in all kinds of animals. Who can do it, we asked ourselves? And we saw that not many animals can do it, in fact. So, we also find huge gaps in the literature, huge holes in the literature. It was unbelievable how little we know about, about many many phyla. We just don't know anything in many cases.
MG: You know, we kept, we kept writing emails to various scientists who work on these totally unknown creatures. They were so happy that someone was interested in them. We got very long answers, and they usually said no, no one has tried to check whether these animals can learn in any associative way.
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29:24
AW: I want to ask; you just mentioned the distribution of unlimited associative learning among taxa. And let's just identify what those taxa are, and then set that in a phylogenetic context to think about when, when did this arise in history? When during time did UAL appear on the scene, and then we'll ask about the consequences of that for the evolution of those taxa. Yeah, so what taxa is it in?
EJ: It exists in arthropods, in vertebrates, and in mollusks. Not in all of them, yes, but in these three groups it exists, it has been found. So, it is possible that it emerged independently in these three groups.
MG: And it's also possible that it, that there is a common ancestor to arthropods and in vertebrates.
AW: And what's your feeling about whether it evolved independently or not?
MG: Difficult to say. My own feeling is that there was a lot of parallel evolution there and that it evolved independently, but I'm not sure because there are amazing similarities in the functional organization of this, the bits of the brain in arthropods and in vertebrates.
AW: Yeah. That's a super interesting question and my gut feeling is that, that those must have been independent evolutions also, but that gets to this really interesting problem that I seem to see coming up in very many different areas of biology about whether current day apparent homologies in function or physiology are true homologies, or whether they just represent sort of parallel convergent evolution using similar preexisting components, right? And, and that to me just seems more likely somehow.
MG: Right, that's always the question.
AW: But let's, let's also, I want to circle back to this issue of, of timing of the emergence of UAL. So, so, when in Earth's history do you think the first UAL came, came into being?
EJ: We think it's in the Cambrian. We don't think it's in the very early Cambrian, probably mid-Cambrian, something like that. The more we learn about you know, the first nervous systems seem to have happened at the late Ediacaran, beginning of the Cambrian. That's when we see them, and we think that UAL evolved rapidly in these three groups, first in arthropods, and vertebrates, and much later in mollusks and the cephalopods.
AW: So, you have this just really really beautiful chapter talking about the consequences of UAL for the explosion and diversity of life that arose during, during the Cambrian. And you're essentially suggesting that the origin of UAL is one of the drivers of the Cambrian Explosion. So, so, lay out that argument. I found that really mind-blowing.
EJ: We think that more generally that it's not UAL alone, that it's associative learning that has, that has really, was one of the drivers of the explosion.
AW: So, even more minimal forms of associative learning would, would drive the explosion.
EJ: Yes yes. They were, they begun the explosion, because first of all, because it is a completely different ballgame that you are in now. You now can adapt during your lifetime, and you can adapt to local conditions, and you can adapt by either, so, if you are a, if you are beginning to learn in this kind of way and you are learning about some prey that, and you can predict that this prey is around because you feel some kind of vibration, or there is a smell that comes, or you smell something, or something like this. And so, you have a huge advantage, obviously. Now, this will start an arms race, because the other organisms will respond. Now, they will not respond necessarily by learning themselves. If they can they will, but maybe they can't but they will respond in other ways. So, they will respond by changing their physiology, their habits, their, their morphology in whatever way, whatever is available evolutionarily at the time. It is very very pragmatic, very contingent. So, there will be, and once it begins, it will start a kind of big arms race. And this arms race will lead to the many things that other people have identified, have thought and we think that they are partially right, but that it was a consequence rather than the initial impetus for the Cambrian, something like the hard parts of animals, as hard parts, the evolution of the more and more complicated nervous systems in animals. Not necessarily in UAL, yes, I mean, UAL has not, not, the fact that almost all animals have nervous systems is very interesting. So, the nervous gives you huge, huge advantages, and it allows you to explore your environment, explore and avoid things, and it is associated with movement, so...
MG: And with rapid movement, and coordination, and synchrony.
EJ: And with rapid movement. Yes, and all these things, you know, it is an interesting thing that with one exception, there are no animals that have a nervous system that do not have muscles.
AW: And what's the exception?
MG: A cnidarian [is this the correct word?].
EJ: Yes, a parasite. Cnidarian parasite.
35:11
MM: So, if this, I mean this is, like Art said, this section of the book really blew me away. There were about 30 of them, but this one was incredibly memorable. Why did the Cambrian Explosion stop, or slow down, or I don't know what the right word is, but is there some, if it's unlimited associative learning, the unlimited part sort of makes it odd that it would've slowed.
EJ: Well first of all, it's not just unlimited associative learning, but we think that there was a cost, there were many costs to this, to both associative learning and to unlimited associative learning.
MG: Over learning.
EJ: When you start the arms race, it is very very very very rapid, but then you come to some kind, you can come to some of equilibrium. However, we also think that a lot of the things that were probably important in the early stages of, of evolution of both associative learning and UAL, were then altered evolutionarily. For example, we think that one of the things that, that happened was that in the beginning, there was much more transgenerational effects of stress, for example. This could go, this was, this, there was, this was a very high cost, and we believe that some of the mechanisms that suppress the transmission of stress related molecules such as small RNAs and things like that to the germ line, evolves during, had to evolve, otherwise you would transmit too much and it will be, it will be deleterious.
AW: And is that what Moncy means by over learning? Is it a kind of way of...
EJ: Over learning is... Over learning is what Nesse called the...
MM: Was that Nesse? The smoke detector principle.
EJ: The smoke detector principle. The smoke detector principle is the principle that it is better for you to run away if you think that there is somebody that's endangering your life than to stay and make sure in many many cases. So, if you have, if you develop a very good associative learning, and let's say you saw something yellow, and this something yellow was a lion, every time you see something yellow, you'll be afraid, right? Not every time I mean, but in the beginning yes. So...
AW: So, you erroneously associate a cue with danger, and then you spend all of your time stressed out and freaked out about, about potential danger, yeah.
EJ: Exactly that. This is, this is the over learning. This is the problem with this. You over learn. You sort of assume that a lot of cues that were predictive in one context will be predictive, will always be predictive, especially if it was a particularly nasty thing. So, one of the things that you have to do is first of all forget. You should not remember everything. If for a while things were not that bad, better forget them for example. So, it's, and in general, forgetting is very very important, because forgetting is part of the way that you decide what kinds of things in the world are relevant for the future. I mean, you don't think in terms of future of course, but evolution molds it in this way. So, you have to have systems that will lead to forgetting. They have to be systems that will lead to a stress response that is not chronic, that is not going on all the time, that stops. So, all these things we believe had to coevolve with associative learning, and especially with unlimited associative learning.
39:01
MG: I think that it, which will make perhaps a sort of connection between UAL and what Eva was now talking about about the stress response. One of the things that characterizes our approach is that we think of consciousness as something that is not just related to cognition. In our approach, cognition and values or feelings are intertwined all the time. So, in the UAL, the expression of that is that the animal has to evaluate, give value, okay? And in, in the Cambrian as Eva described, the stress response was a result of learning more and more. So, you see how cognition and emotions go together. And I don't think that this is something that other, other researchers have put an emphasis on. There are those that lean more on cognitive aspects and those that lean more on emotions, but not in this combination.
EJ: We think that what is very very good about this associative, about this structure, this UAL, when you're thinking about learning, you have to, about complex learning, you have to think about integration of information. You have to think about memory. You have to think about integration of the model of the world and the model of the body, and the model of their interaction. You have to think about the value system. So, you have to think about all these things that are, and they come together naturally and inevitably when you are thinking about this kind of learning.
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41:20
MM: Maybe it's time to try to move towards human consciousness but let me ask you to go down a path that, something that we haven't really quite touched on yet, and that's whether consciousness is an adaptation.
EJ: Okay. So, the adaptation question is complicated. We think that consciousness is a teleology constituting framework. So, it creates a space of new goals for the organism. The goal is no longer just the goal of surviving and reproducing. Of course, everything, this is the basis of everything. If it's not surviving and reproducing, forget about it. But there is a new space of goals for it, and this space of goals is what we are interested in. And this in a sense, if you want to think about what it is, what is the function so to speak of consciousness, it is creating this new framework of goals for the organism, for the survival and reproduction of the organism. But it is this space, this new space of goals, that we are interested in. We want to see what it means to have this new space of goals. What does it mean to have this new teleological system in place? What does it mean to be a creature with this type of goals? That's why we say that to think about the function of consciousness in the same sense that you are thinking about the function of the immune system, or hearing, or something like that, this is not very good. It doesn't do justice to what consciousness is. It doesn't, it makes it like any other trait, and it is not like any other trait. It is something that opens up a whole, a whole space of, well, new goals.
AW: Well, so, so, I just want to sort of back up and just state how I, how I view these transitions that you've talked about in your book, and we spent a lot of time on limited associative learning and unlimited associative learning, LAL and UAL, and we skipped over the early transitions even to just neural animals in the first place, and the origins of nervous systems, and I think we don't have time to really, really cover that. But then you have these sorts of later, later transitions that follow from UAL to imagination and symbolic communication and the things you were just talking about, Eva. But but I want to maybe just for a couple of minutes talk about episodic-like memory and the roles that it plays in those later transitions, and sort of what, what's special about human consciousness and how did we get there, like how did it emerge?
EJ: Yes, when we didn't, well, first of all, when we're talking about the transition from UAL to [word?] organisms, organisms with imagination, it is very clear to us that it is a very gradual process. It's very very...it's clear to us that when we say that for example that a bee and an elephant have an ability to imagine, they don't have the same ability to imagine. The imagination of the bee is very very much more restricted. When we're saying that for example, when you are talking about exotic-like memory in animals, you are talking about the ability to know what happened, when it happened, and where it happened, and sometimes how it happened and who was there.
AW: Sort of keeping track of events in time and space in a way that other organisms don't, yeah.
EJ: Yes, it's very very difficult for many organisms. Now, we don't know who exactly can do it and who can't, and we think that there are many many gradations here. It's a very very, very very gradual process, so, we don't have suddenly a really, it's not as if consciousness is emerging. But consciousness becomes more and more complicated and diverse during, during, during evolution. Now, animals like chimpanzees, like elephants, very intelligent animals, or like parrots, some parrots, very very, or jays, very very intelligent animals like that, can plan the future. We know because there are many experiments that show that they can actually plan the future. What they can't do is they cannot communicate about the future. I cannot tell you look, if I am an elephant, look, this, this person did something very very bad to my mother and I hate him. I can maybe show this to you, but I can't tell you that, right? I can't, I can't tell you that my parents were...
AW: Right, it's too abstract and they don't have the communicative tools, yeah.
EJ: Yes. I don't know who said that, but I can't tell you that my parents were almost [word?] poor, right? I cannot communicate about the imagined, about what is not in the here and now. To some extent, I can do it to a very limited extent. It's not completely, completely impossible, but it's very very very limited. With language, this changed. This is what languages do. This is the displacement of language. It can do this kind of thing. And once language was in place, and again this was an evolutionary process, it didn't happen in one day, and there were stages there, and we didn't go into that, but once, once we have language, we have this ability to talk about the impossible, about the possible, about the imaginary, about the absurd, about everything, right? Not about everything, because there are things about which we can't talk really very well. This is another very interesting thing about learning. There are a lot of things that we can convey very much better through body language, through gestures.
AW: Through music.
EJ: Through music, exactly. Music was very important too in human evolution, by the way. And we think that there was a coevolution of language and emotions and including music. This is a story into which we did not go because we couldn't.
MG: Another book. No, but if we go back to episodic-like memory, I think it's true that we don't have a clear-cut marker for a transition, but nevertheless, we do know, we do think that another level in the hierarchy was necessary.
EJ: The brain hierarchy.
MG: Yes. Because you need a new type of representation for an episode. It's something more complex than what was there before. And in point of fact, structurally speaking, looking at the brain morphology, it does seem that those animals that clearly do have episodic-like memory have a differentiated hippocampus. This exists in both...
EJ: In, in vertebrates.
MG: Right.
AW: So, hippocampus is a sort of key structure for facilitating the episodes.
EJ: It's very important. It's not the only thing, it's not the only thing.
MG: Right.
EJ: I mean, we need, there's a need not only for...the emotion gets a lot more differentiated we think.
49:03
MM: Hm. So, Moncy, can I get you to expand on that a little bit? I think that, I know something that's intrigued me since I first started thinking about consciousness and I bet a lot of listeners are asking the same thing, I mean in the context of ELM, is that part of what makes humans special, and is ELM one of the things that makes it feel like there's a little person behind our eyes that's experiencing what's going on?
MG: No, I don't...
EJ: Not ELM.
MG: No, not ELM at all.
EJ: You need language for that.
MG: Right. It's the language. It's the reflection that makes human consciousness so special. The fact that you can think that you are having a thought, that you can think that you are having a feeling, and I don't think that there is any particular brain structure that we can point at here. Obviously, things are very complex, you have, you have a very complex structure of the human brain, but I don't think we can really pinpoint areas in the brain that are responsible for our humanness.
EJ: But we can say something about the fact that we have autobiographical memory, and so, that we tell ourselves a story about ourselves all of the time, and we keep telling it to ourselves, so there is this super, and there is the feeling that we have of ourselves as a, as a subject of a narrative that we tell ourselves. And this is something that is very special to humans, of course. And it is also, we have this narrative that we tell ourselves and this narrative is embedded in the, in the social world in which we live, and the social world in which we live is the world of norms and of, and of symbolic values, and we know what to do, we don't always do it. And yes, and when I say I should do that, I should do this, what is the "I" that I am talking about, right? I have a kind of "I" in mind, even if I don't define it very well to myself, which is a very different "I" from the "I" that the dog would have.
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51:37
AW: I want to ask a related question about, and this is something we've talked with some of our other guests about, including Dennis Noble, but about free will, and whether you think humans have free will.
EJ: I think that humans have a feeling of free will.
AW: But, but do we actually have it?
EJ: You know, do we have love? There are humans who love and humans who suffer. Do love and suffering exist in some way outside humans who love and suffer? I don't think so. I think in the same way we have a feeling of free will. It is one of the things that defines us as human beings. It is enormously important, but I don't think that there is something that is free will, yes? I think it is what, it is a constructed feeling, and it is the most, one of the most important feelings of human beings. But I don't think that we can say more about it than this.
MG: I think we, I think we can say though that just as I feel that I am conscious, I feel that I have free will. It's the same, at the same level. It's real as a subjective experience.
EJ: And it's one of the most important ones that we have. Without it, we won't, I don't want to think about a world in which humans feel that they don't have free will. It will be a totally immoral world.
AW: But but feeling that you have free will is not, you're saying, not necessarily the same thing as actually having it, and maybe that doesn't even matter really.
EJ: I don't know what having it is. What do you mean by having it?
AW: That's a good question.
EJ: You know, I mean, I think that if you feel, yes, because I think that if you, if you have a feeling of free will, then you have a feeling of free will, and you are acting as a person who can choose this or that, right? And you make this choice consciously, it's not just that you have a lot of possibilities, and you happen to do this or happen to do that. No! You want to do this, or you want to do that. And this feeling is the most, is very very important. What else would it be? Would it be some kind of spirit that enters into you? No, we don't believe in this kind of thing. But we do believe very strongly that human feelings are very very different from the feelings of other animals. We think that we have the feeling of free will, but no other animal has, although animals can hesitate between, you know, they can hesitate, they can want this, they can want this, they can hesitate, but this is not free will. When we talk about human free will, we talk about something else.
54:25
MM: Can I ask you to, to sort of talk about free will in the way that you framed consciousness a little while ago where it's sort of this arena in which our priorities all get aligned? Can you make, can we think about it, is there a way to think about free will in that context, not so much as an adaptation, but what kind of function might our feeling of free will have or have had?
EJ: It's an interesting question. I didn't think about it in this way, but I thought about, the way that I thought about free will was as part of the new feelings that a creature with a language, with language and with symbolic thought, and with a kind of superego, which is then internalized kind of norms of society.
MG: But maybe you are right. Maybe it's a new mode of being. We should pursue that.
EJ: It's, it is very interesting because it is very much part of the mode of being that is the human mode of being, but for me, it depends on our ability to sort of have this kind of autobiographical sense of self which is dependent on language, and evolutionarily dependent on language. And, and free will, the feeling of free will, the feeling that I'm a person that can do this or that and it's not something that, and I'm not a slave to anything, enslaved by anything, internally or externally, and if I am I will rebel, yes? I mean, this I think is something very very human that I think Moncy is right that maybe we didn't put enough stress on it as part of this mode of being that is human.
56:26
AW: I want to ask another question that is different but feels intuitively related to this somehow, and that is about the ethical implications of, of your work and your thinking about, about consciousness and this distribution among animals. So, so based on your ideas and your writing of this books, does that change the way you view our ethical responsibility toward other animals in terms of, you know, animals that we farm or eat, the way we use animals in research, all of our interactions with animals?
EJ: Yes. For me, it's also personal, it was one of the things that made me become, well I'm not totally, but more and more vegetarian, and also it really made a difference to me to the way that I see things. I always had a lot of problems. I mean, I always intuitively felt that certain invertebrates, most vertebrates, and most, I didn't think terribly much about insects, I must admit, are, feel pleasure and pain and things like this, and we have to be, to treat them accordingly, of course. But I think that the more I learned about it, it really made a difference to me. So, this is one thing that I think, yes, I think definitely we must take it on board. How we take it on board, I think this is very simple. Obviously, we have to minimize suffering, obviously. How we do this, and what are the, what price do we pay, and how, what kind of compromises do we make, this is the different...
AW: It's funny, so, Marty and I were arguing about this before, this morning before we started talking to you, and I was, I think I have a very similar reaction to you, Eva, that there's something about simply focusing on consciousness as a thing, and as distribution among taxa that makes me feel like, you know, I should rethink the way that I interact with animals, and I should, I should eat, I'm not a vegetarian, but I think just, just thinking about that, even though you know, at some level I understand that animals you know have a lot of these neural processes, and I guess I don't know what I'm trying to say, except that just thinking about this very issue is changing the way that I think about my, my ethics of animals.
MG: That's interesting, because I did not become a vegetarian, but I do feel guiltier when I eat animals, and I agree with you that it does cause a type of rethinking. I don't feel that when I eat shrimp, I'm less guilty though than when I eat a hamburger.
EJ: I do.
MG: I know that you do. I don't.
EJ: Well, I, you know, it's very very personal, this kind of thing. It's not totally rational, and I'm not totally consistent. I, there are things I don't eat, absolutely.
MG: The reason I laughed earlier about plants, consciousness in plants, is think about the ethical implications of that. Those people who think that they are conscious, what on earth will they eat? So, you know what answer I heard? I got the answer, that we will eat, you should eat only those plants that have to go through your stomach in order to reproduce.
MM: Oh my goodness. Wow.
AW: Oh no!
MM: Well this is really a problem, this is really a problem for the panpsychists though, right? I mean, even breathing is sort of suspect.
MG: Right!
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1:00:41
MM: I don't remember reading anything in your book about your expectations, your predictions for consciousness elsewhere, assuming that we will find life, which I know is no small thing. But assuming that we do find life and the arguments that in particular you made about the Cambrian Explosion, do you think that there's a reasonable expectation to find consciousness?
EJ: You know, if, if you will find life in other planets, I don't see why a small subsection of those you would not find conscious creatures. It's an evolutionary process, and I guess evolution is universal.
MG: If it is universal, if the type of life that you would find there is life as we know it.
EJ: Yes, I mean, you know, I can't think about life as we don't know it, and I can't think about, yeah, no, I mean, we don't know, you are right. I mean, first, shall we be able to recognize it as life in the first place?
MG: Well, this is, this is what people talk about when they talk about silicon-based life, so, there may be robots, there may be silicon-type life, which is not life as we know it, and there may be types of robots that will evolve there. So, we can't really know whether the developmental processes and the evolutionary processes would be parallel to the ones here on Earth. So, I don't think it's easy. I can't give an answer to that.
EJ: I would expect that if some kind, form of life would evolve, there, you, Moncy is right, because we, in the sense that I think she is right that we have to think about the kind of material implementation of both life and consciousness. And consciousness as we know it is biological consciousness. We don't have conscious robots. The question whether or not we will have them is a very open question, and a very difficult question. And I think that the material aspect is very important, something that we have to think about quite a lot. To say that...
AW: You mean like, consciousness may only arise in organic, soft-bodied materials and not in metal and circuits and so on?
MG: Maybe not. Maybe yes, maybe not.
EJ: And if, and yes, but we can't assume that it will. We can't assume that it is, we can't, we cannot make the assumption that for sure it can arise in non-biological materials. I'm not saying that it can't. In fact, I have a small belief that it can, okay? But I think that we are very very far from it, that we'll have to, that the kind of entity that, the kind of, I don't know how to call it, artificial being that will be created, will be very different from what we imagine at present. But nevermind, but I think that the material, the question of material is very important, and Moncy is right. Maybe consciousness can be only implemented in life as we know it. Maybe. But maybe not.
AW: Well, I want to ask a really broad sort of open ended question here at the very end, and that is if you're to envision your own work and the field as a whole, thinking about consciousness over the next five or ten years, what sorts of progress do you think we're going to see, and what specifically will you be working on?
MG: Well, I don't know what progress will be, but I can tell you what we will be working on, yeah.
AW: No crystal ball, yeah?
MG: We will be working on what we call a picture book, a very thin book, which will try to present some of our ideas in "The Sensitive Soul" book in a very short way with a lot of poems and a lot of art, because one of the things we discovered was that many of the questions we deal with are of interest to our friends who are not experts, to parts of the family, and they are really very very captivated by many of the questions, and I think we owe it to them to create such a book.
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1:05:37
AW: On the first page of their book, Eva and Moncy highlighted the work of two Big Biology alumni, Dennis Noble and Pat Churchland, and in our interview, they brought up a third Big Biolgy guest, Randy Nesse.
MM: We didn't plan this, but it was exciting to realize that so many scientists are trying to understand how our bodies are connected to our subjective experiences. With Randy Nesse, we talked about how bad feelings could have had some evolutionary benefit.
AW: With Dennis Noble, we discussed the importance of randomness in biology, in particular in regard to free will. With Pat Churchland, we discussed why she believes brain states are mental states, and how those states affect our philosophy and our political beliefs.
MM: In their book, Eva and Moncy tied many of these ideas together, their chapters tracing the major evolutionary transitions in neural systems, forms of learning, and ultimately consciousness itself.
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AW: Thanks for listening to the show, although you really didn't have a choice anyway, because free will is an illusion. In that case, embrace that tug on your conscience and donate to Big Biology on our Patreon page. Go to www.patreon.com/bigbiology to make a monthly donation, or head to www.bigbiology.org to make a one-time contribution.
MM: On the next episode of Big Biology, we talk to Mike Levin, a biologist at Tufts University who studies novel forms of inheritance, those that affect development and body plans in all sorts of animals. And no, this Mike is not our associate producer Mike.
ML: And I make the argument that biology is absolutely reprogrammable. Evolution discovered this very early on, and so, what we're better off with is this idea of, of thinking about the genome is not the software of the cell by any means. The genome is what specifies the hardware. The genome is what tells every cell what proteins it gets to have, but once you've made that hardware, much like any of the good digital hardware that we make, it has a default behavior which is what it'll normally do when you turn the juice on, but it is also reprogrammable, meaning by judicial choice of inputs and signals and experiences that it has, that it will go to other modes of, of being besides the default that normally just happens when you, when you turn on the power.
AW: Thanks to Matt Blois for producing this episode, Mike Levin manages our social media accounts and produces the Student Spotlights, and Dana Baxter helps with background research. As always, Steve Lane manages the website.
MM: Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida and the College of Humanities and Sciences at the University of Montana for support.
AW: Music on the episode is from Poddington Bear.