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Consciousness As An Emergent Order

There are numerous theories to explain the origin of consciousness, from it being an intrinsic part of the brain to the brain being like a television aerial that picks up Universal Consciousness. But with a billion neurons and a subjective viewpoint, there may be another, equally valid theory of origin.

Click on the following website and download the software that you see there: www.theory.org/software/ant/ and have a play with it. Hopefully you will find a little program called Langton’s Ant, which simulates a creature which lives in a virtual world with very few rules.

Here are the rules, buellt-pointed so that you can see how simple this ant universe is:

These five rules might be considered to be the basic Laws of the Ant Universe (capital letters intended). They detail the nature of the space that the ant walks on. Once the program starts running however, a few more rules come into play that affect the colour of the squares and the movement of the ant across the world’s space:

So here we have a simulation of a very simple world with only eight physical laws. We might expect therefore, for the ant in this universe to behave in a very predictable and lawful manner. And as we run the program through time, we find the ant describes some fairly regular geometric patterns of white and black squares on this 2D space.

Those readers who are familiar with a bit of chaos theory might expect the next stage of the ant’s life to happen – the geometric patterns begin to break up and become chaotic until they become random. It might be argued that the large scale nature of this chaotic behaviour is fairly predictable too, though the specifics of which way the ant will move and what the pattern will look like in 100 moves’ time is probably not.

So, the ant’s world descends into chaos. But what happens next is completely unexpected, and, from the point of view of our eight universal rules stated above, completely unpredictable.

The ant starts to build a ‘road’ out of the chaos. This road consists of 117 moves (or steps) over the squares and this series of 117 moves repeats indefinitely; each time leaving the ant displaced one square across and one square down. Run the program and watch. The road builds out of the chaos and continues seemingly forever.

How is this kind of behaviour possible? The answer is that scientists, philosophers and chaos mathematicians of all kinds do not know. The only way we can know about this type of behaviour – this road-building order emerging out of the chaos – is to run the program and watch what happens, but at our civilisation’s present stage of scientific development, there are no laws, equations or otherwise to describe or codify this behaviour.

Emergent order is, at the present time, not only unpredictable, but also uncodifiable and therefore unknowable until it occurs. This has enormous ramifications for science. Take this story for example:

“Since 1993, an engineer named Adrian Thompson has been evolving circuits using, not a computer, but real circuits and logic cells. This is because he suspects real circuits will do things either against, or perhaps in addition to, the rules that a computer has been programmed with. His approach is to decide on a task, generate some random circuits and build them, and then run through various steps determined by the performance of the circuits to improve the performance towards completing the task.

The task was this: to distinguish between two input frequencies – one of 1000 Hz and one of 10,000 Hz (or a low tone and a high tone if you like) and produce an output signal that demonstrates that the circuit has made the distinction.

For the first step, a random circuit of 100 logic cells was used, and as expected, this circuit did not perform at all, but slowly, over thousands of steps, features were found in the evolving circuits which began to move the circuit towards performing the task.

It took a total of 4100 steps for the desired result to be achieved and the task to be completed, but what was strange was the design of the circuit. No human engineer would have – or could have – designed the circuit this way.

The final circuit used a total of 32 connected logic cells, and five other logic cells which were completely unconnected to the circuit. If these five isolated cells which – according to known electrical laws, at least – had no effect on the circuit were removed, the circuit ceased to work. Additionally, the evolved circuit did not bother with an internal clock to measure the different input frequencies. It used some other – still unknown – method to generate a distinction between the inputs.

Thompson put it like this: “I have no idea how it works.”

 (adapted from Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen, 1999)

Amazing. An ant universe with only eight rules and we find emergent order out of random chaos, and from a randomly generated circuit of 100 logic cells we find another emergent order whose inner workings verge on the mystical.

It has long been said that out of order comes chaos, and out of chaos comes order. Imagine how much more chaos, and how much more emergent order can arise from systems which have vast numbers of elements and rules – much more than eight or a hundred.

The brain is one such system. If we can consider a neuron to be a single element, then the brain has over a billion of them. Add to that the fact that each neuron probably connects to around a million others and we have a system which contains a million billion (or 10 15) raw elements.

Of course, we are ignoring the fact that a neuron itself is a complex system, as are many of the chemicals – from oxygen, hormones and protein to alcohol and DMT – which enter into the brain’s system on a regular basis. These might increase the number of elements of the brain to well over 10 18 (one followed by eighteen zeroes) or more.

Add to that the numerous physical (both classical and quantum), chemical, biological, behavioural, social, psychological, neurological and electrical laws which act on the brain system and the total number of elements and rules within the brain’s operating ‘universe’ becomes staggeringly large.

How, then, can we predict the behaviour of such a system. If a universe of eight rules produces emergent order such as the ‘ant road’, can’t we reasonably expect some kind of similar and fairly regular emergent order arising out of the chaos of the human nervous system?

One likely candidate for this emergent order is, it seems to me, consciousness. Numerous neurologists have for some years now been trying to isolate the origin of consciousness.

Some have come up with the idea that consciousness arises out of certain ‘nomadic’ cells and chemicals which migrate and regroup around different parts of the brain depending on what the consciousness is ‘doing’ at that time.

Others have sought to find a consciousness-generating part of the brain, or stranger still, a ‘receiver’ for the Universal Consciousness that picks up a signal of consciousness just as a TV aerial picks up a radio signal.

But perhaps no specific origin point for our own consciousness will ever be found. Perhaps it is an emergent order arising from the almost infinite complexity of the human brain and nervous system.

As such, like Thompson’s circuit of 32 connected and five disconnected logic cells, consciousness may eventually be found to be present and have its origins both inside the nervous system and outside.

That is to say, human consciousness as an emergent order may be both within us and without.

References

Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen “The Science of Discworld”; Ebury Press, 1999.

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