incomplete notes in progress

Consciousness

(see shamanism, Wikiwand definition and other keywords)

A range of meanings

• The term consciousness can apply to the Universe, human society, individual humans or machines (c.f. Artificial Intelligence).
• Here, we use it for pragmatic purposes, rather than for philosophical or psychological revelation.
• Unfortunately, we lack a word in English that perfectly summarises what we need for our purposes.
• In ancient Greece, the word for truth (αλήθεια) was opposite to a state of oblivion.
• It was associated with being awake, rather than asleep, therefore we can associate it with 'awareness'.
• But 'consciousness' is more than one state of awareness: we might see it as a coherent set of awarenesses.

The elusive nature of consciousness

• In recent terms the English word 'consciousness' probably grew from a more social and moral idea of 'conscience'.
• More recent notions of 'consciousness' have also been shaped by anthropocentric and humanistic tendencies. Some of these are stridently individualistic or, even, solipsistic.
• Some define the ‘consciousness’ of a system as its quality of self-awareness.
• However, if we apply this to organisational or individual consciousness we might also need to include their interactively responsible awareness of worlds beyond itself.
• Importantly, where ‘awareness’ describes local fields of self-regulating micro-sensations and experiences, ‘consciousness’ emerges at a higher level that coordinates them, albeit using similar principles.
• It is, therefore, safer to think of consciousness as the self-coordinated awareness of many local regions of self-regulated awareness.

Different models

1. Global Consciousness:

• In recent terms the English word 'consciousness' derived from a social and moral idea of 'conscience'.
• This contrasts with earlier, more metaphysical notions. Anaxagoras (500–428 BC), for example, spoke of a Universal Mind, which he imagined as tiny ‘seeds’ of reality that permeated everywhere.
• A more recent echo of this scale of thinking is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's (1959) spiritually inspired science of a ‘global consciousness’ - a kind of ‘total’ intelligence that permeates everywhere.
• Margulis and Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis subsequently offered a more systemic approach that accounts for ecological coherence and enables consideration of all parts of the living global system, both animate and inanimate.
• Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) saw collective consciousness as the shared beliefs and moral attitudes that bring unity to social behaviour.

2. The concept of Virtual consciousness:

• Today the word virtual has become associated with the virtual reality created by CAD systems and rendered. It therefore suggests a 'false' or 'illusory' version of what we understand to be 'real'. This is very different from how Plato saw it. It is likely that he was inspired by factory production systems in which a product coming off the production line is not quite as perfect as the original prototype (i.e. paradigm). In Plato's day, people believed that everything is a copy of a higher form created by God. He therefore understood that, say, a factory produced plate or saucer was an imperfect version of a hypothetical reality (i.e. meta-plate or meta-saucer) that could be modelled using Euclidean geometry. As number systems are designed for absolute precision (e.g. X=X, 4=4, etc.) we may sympathise with this view.
• However, according to Kurt Gödel, no mathematical system can be both consistent and true at the same time/place. (see Gödel's incompleteness theorems).

3. Collective Consciousness

• Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious is a Platonic idea in that he saw universal similarities within humanity's common instincts and universal symbols that he called archetypes. Notably, although this may offer a reasonable case for shared, even 'universal', similarities of thoughts and ideas the notion of consciousness as a set of reciprocal awarenesses seems only latent and localised.

4. Network Consciousness:

• In the last few thousand years, organisational technologies have influenced how we think about consciousness. Although some may seem mechanistic or reductionist, they also offer new analogies by which we might compare previous notions of consciousness.
• Today's global digital network is one part of these much bigger ideas of 'consciousness' in which the idea of 'network consciousness' applies to practicalities of bureaucratic organisations. This permits us to envisage a hypothetical network that is 100% conscious. Van Norde et al. (2019) has referenced the ancient figure of Indra's Net, citing it as a "metaphor for the manner in which each thing that exists is dependent for both its existence and its identity upon every other thing that exists."
• Marvin Minsky (a key thinker in the development of digital computers) refuted the idea that humans are highly conscious, declaring that consciousness is merely a ‘low-grade system for keeping records’ (cf. Minsky, 1994). He was referring to an early programming language called LISP that anticipated features of today's AI systems. Its distinctive parameters included reflective programming, self-hosting compilers and recursion.

5. Automated self-consciousness

• Although, as Minsky claimed, computer programmes may make more frequent 'inquiries' about their own state than humans, this habit is designed to enable a technological system to function. It uses allopoietic) algorithms, rather than from a living (i.e. embodied and autopoietic) sense of curiosity. This is relevant when considering Artifical Intelligence systems. At the semantic level, AI systems may produce what computer scientists call vacuous truths including hypothetical propositions that may seem plausible but chimerical or misleading. Meinong used the term subsisting to differentiate them from (real) things that exist). Russell described them as non-existent objects of the mind.

6. Embodied Consciousness:

• For humans, the interplay between machine, mathematical or logical semantics and what we casually call common sense may seem irreconcilable. The mathematician Pascal famously said that, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (1669). And Michel Polanyi went further, asserting that ''all knowledge is tacit knowledge if it rests on our subsidiary awareness of particulars in terms of a comprehensive unity" (Polanyi, 1969). This is because (human) thinking requires some essential interdependencies of mind and body.
• A symptom of this is what Kahneman (2011) identifies as the split between 'fast thinking' and 'slow thinking'. This is also similar to differences between what Heidegger calls (Western/alphabetical?) 'thinking' and 'design thinking' described by Schon as reflection-in-action.

7. Limits to social consciousness:

• In practical organisational terms, increasing the number of participants in a group, organisation, or community usually leads to the emergence of a hierarchy. Here, hierarchical management structures inevitably reduce the number and/or quality of face-to-face meetings.
• Another way to say this, is that governance becomes 'dumbed-down' when we scaled-up communities to sizes that become alienating. Notably, whereas the scale of Indra's Net is potentially infinite, the scope of human consciousness is limited by our cognitive inability to cope with many more than 150 group members (see Dunbar number).

8. Team Consciousness

• (See Team Consciousness - a sketch intended for practical application within organisations).

9. Individual consciousness

• Semir Zeki regards individual consciousness as consisting of many separate 'micro-consciousnesses' that coexist at different levels in the brain. This corresponds with Gazzaniga's and Libet's work in which they speak of 'confabulation' in the way that sub-agencies of the brain account for contradictory evidence appearing at the conscious level from different routes.

10. Alienation: (antithesis)

• Here, Karl Marx's uses of the term alienation are interesting as they offer a kind of political and organisational antithesis to consciousness. Marx identified four types of alienation (i.e. disconnection) between workers and aspects of their environment - i.e.:
  • Alienation of the worker from their product
  • Alienation of the worker from the act of production
  • Alienation of the worker from their Gattungswesen (German: species-essence)
  • Alienation of the worker from other workers
• If we map these ideas into the whole social and technological system they can be seen as a lack of consciousness in specific regions.

Further reading

• Van Norden, Bryan and Nicholaos Jones, "Huayan Buddhism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).