Following up on previous post on ants and superorganisms and my call for a wide net in modeling cognition…

Here’s Christof Koch in 2009 setting the stage for Giulio Tononi‘s integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness.

The truth is that we really do not know which of these organisms is or is not conscious. We have strong feelings about the matter, molded by tradition, religion and law. But we have no objec­tive, rational method, no step­by­step procedure, to determine whether a giv­en organism has subjective states, has feelings.

The reason is that we lack a coherent framework for consciousness. Although consciousness is the only way we know about the world within and around us— shades of the famous Cartesian deduc­tion cogito, ergo sum—there is no agree­ ment about what it is, how it relates to highly organized matter or what its role in life is. This situation is scandalous! We have a detailed and very successful framework for matter and for energy but not for the mind­body problem. This dis­mal state of affairs might be about to change, however.

The universal lingua franca of our age is information. We are used to the idea that stock and bond prices, books, photographs, movies, music and our genetic makeup can all be turned into data streams of zeros and ones. These bits are the elemental atoms of information that are transmitted over an Ethernet cable or via wireless, that are stored, replayed, copied and assem­ bled into gigantic repositories of knowl­ edge. Information does not depend on the substrate. The same information can be represented as lines on paper, as elec­ trical charges inside a PC’s memory banks or as the strength of the synaptic connections among nerve cells.

So as a recovering mathematician eager to keep up with developments in the field of cognitive science, I realize now I’m at least a couple years behind. It looks like Tononi’s work is heading down the line I’ve wanted to see for a while.

Ah well, at least I’m no further behind with my favorite branches of science as I am with the latest music. And I’m a professional musician!

I just came across AntBlog.co.uk via Twitter and I’m glad I did.

Are Ants Conscious? (Part 1)

Bullant ant head detail, Taken by Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au, shared under GNU Free Documentation License

On questions of animal consciousness (or the nature of human consciousness), I find myself in the camp which cries, “wrong question!”. I think we overprivilege the notion of consciousness to the detriment of cognition, intelligence, sentience, ego… or other complex phenomena making up the self.

I also think it’s high time we develop more models of animal intelligence—or intelligences even more alien to our quotidian personal experience, such as superorganisms. I want to hear good ideas about how we would even recognize sentience or intelligence… nascent self-awareness… if and when we find it staring us in the face.

Blue sky here… I even want a branch of cognitive science to investigate how to remove—or abstract away—the time component from naive notions of intelligence, so we at least have the capability to recognize whether a virus complex or fungal mat might be modeled as some form of intelligence in the (chemical, genetic, sexual-reproductive) messaging between parts of its network. As a non-specialist, I keep looking for developments in this area.

Are Ants Conscious? (Part 2)

The Honey Bee has a brain one cubic millimetre in size, but in this space it crams just shy of a million neurons, giving it almost 10 times the density of its mammalian counterparts. Ants have fewer neurons, with (still impressive, given their size) 250,000; two and a half times as many as a lobster. Contrast this with a human’s one billion neurons, and we see that the ant and the bee are some way off in the synapse stakes. That said, it pays to remember that an Elephant has twice as many neurons as a human.

The neurons in a bees brain, as with other species, are interconnected in ways that we are yet to fully understand. Neuroscientist Christof Koch works on the neural basis of consciousness and has this to say on the subject of Bee intelligence; “Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organisations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources and can fly several kilometres and return to their hive. A remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment”. He goes on to comment about the possibility of bee consciousness “Given all of this ability, why does almost everybody instinctively reject the idea that bees or other insects might be conscious?”

I’m interested in notions of selves (minds, psyches) as interacting complexes with strong feedback loops and intercommunication: both networks within a single brain, and networks of signaling between multiple brains.

In this terrific little video, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist first explodes once-fashionable ideas about the left and right brain which held sway from the 60s to the early 80s. After thoroughly demolishing the traditional splits (reason/imagination, verbal/spacial), he takes a surprise turn and tells us how these hemispheres really do have qualitatively different roles after all. Finally he takes in the full sweep of history and points out our near-worship of the fruits of the left brain… to the detriment of society. A fascinating grand tour: heavy on vision, very light on references. Fortunately, he makes a persuasive case that if we take the concepts from this talk, we can go explore the literature for ourselves and confirm what research is continuing to reveal about the divided brain.