Donald F. Padelford - Consciousness in Evolution: Sketch for a New Model – A Speculation

There are two basic assumptions is current evolutionary theory - (1) natural selection, in conjunction with heritable variation and resource limitation, is the principal driver of evolution, and (2) evolution is a product of natural selection. This is known as the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. A more expansive version of this theory is as follows:

The modern synthesis bridged the gap between experimental geneticists and naturalists, and between both and palaeontologists. It states that:^[3][4][5]

1. All evolutionary phenomena can be explained in a way consistent with known genetic mechanisms and the observational evidence of naturalists.
2. Evolution is gradual: small genetic changes, recombination ordered by natural selection. Discontinuities amongst species (or other taxa) are explained as originating gradually through geographical separation and extinction (not saltation).
3. Selection is overwhelmingly the main mechanism of change; even slight advantages are important when continued. The object of selection is the phenotype in its surrounding environment. The role of genetic drift is equivocal; though strongly supported initially by Dobzhansky, it was downgraded later as results from ecological genetics were obtained.
4. The primacy of population thinking: the genetic diversity carried in natural populations is a key factor in evolution. The strength of natural selection in the wild was greater than expected; the effect of ecological factors such as niche occupation and the significance of barriers to gene flow are all important.
5. In palaeontology, the ability to explain historical observations by extrapolation from microevolution to macroevolution is proposed. Historical contingency means explanations at different levels may exist. Gradualism does not mean constant rate of change.

The idea that speciation occurs after populations are reproductively isolated has been much debated.

This theory will no doubt be soon amended to include the findings of epigenetics, which shows that evolution is also influenced by environmental factors within a singled generation to produce adaptations.

In biology, the term epigenetics refers to changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek: over; above) -genetics. These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;^[1] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.^[2]

Notice anything missing from any of these explanations of evolution?

How about consciousness?

Let's backtrack for a moment. In July I review B Alan Wallace's Hidden Dimensions for Wildmind Buddhist Meditation. In this book, Wallace argued that consciousness played a crucial role in the formation and evolution of the universe:

The notion of an observer necessarily implies the presence of consciousness, without which no observation ever takes place, and … consciousness, far from being an insignificant by-product of brain activity, plays a crucial role in the formation and evolution of the universe. (109)

I gladly acknowledge that consciousness now plays a role in the evolution of life on Earth, and maybe even in the universe - but I objected then (and now) to the notion that it played a role in the formation of the universe:

Aside from the fact that the universe existed quite well without human consciousness, or any consciousness, for about 14.5 billion years, the essential flaw here is that it does not require consciousness, human or otherwise, to impact the outcome of a measurement. It simply requires the act of measurement, which only requires another electron, and contrary to popular understanding, that measurement effect is fully reversible.

Some Buddhist readers of that review objected to my position. My response is that consciousness is an emergent property - essentially, that is could not have been predicted by an observation of the material universe prior to its arrival. Here is the best definition of emergent properties (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

Emergent properties are systemic features of complex systems which could not be predicted (practically speaking; or for any finite knower; or for even an ideal knower) from the standpoint of a pre-emergent stage, despite a thorough knowledge of the features of, and laws governing, their parts. (Epistemological Emergence)

There is also an Ontological Emergence approach, which I think also applied to the nature of consciousness in the universe:

Ontological emergentists see the physical world as entirely constituted by physical structures, simple or composite. But composites are not (always) mere aggregates of the simples. There are layered strata, or levels, of objects, based on increasing complexity. Each new layer is a consequence of the appearance of an interacting range of ‘novel qualities.’ Their novelty is not merely temporal (such as the first instance of a particular geometric configuration), nor the first instance of a particular determinate of a familiar determinable (such as the first instance of mass 157.6819 kg in a contiguous hunk of matter). Instead, it is a novel, fundamental type of property altogether. We might say that it is ‘nonstructural,’ in that the occurrence of the property is not in any sense constituted by the occurrence of more fundamental properties and relations of the object's parts. Further, newness of property, in this sense, entails new primitive causal powers, reflected in laws which connect complex physical structures to the emergent features. (Broad's trans-ordinal laws are laws of this sort.)

Consciousness is precisely this kind of novel property of matter - "not in any sense constituted by the occurrence of more fundamental properties and relations of [its] parts."

This is not my idea - it is one of many attempts to explain consciousness without resorting to dualism. Here, also from the Standford Encyclopedia, is how some conceptualize this approach:

Some metaphysicians and philosophers of mind contend that there are strong first-person, introspective grounds for supposing that consciousness, intentionality, and/or human agency are ontologically emergent. The intrinsic qualitative and intentional properties of our experience, they suggest, appear to be of a fundamentally distinct character from the properties described by the physical and biological sciences.^[12] And our experience of our own deliberate agency suggests a form of ‘direct’, macroscopic control over the general parameters of our behavior that cannot be reduced to the summation of individual causal interchanges of relevant portions of the cerebral and motor cortex.^[13]

One important point needs to be made here - I do not limit the emergence of consciousness to the structures of the brain. Rather, with Antonio Damasio, I believe that consciousness and "mind" are emergent properties of the entire body. Consciousness, like emotions and the sense of self, is an embodied, emergent property.

All of this is to set-up an excellent and interesting new article in the current issue of the Integral Review, by Donald F. Padelford, Consciousness in Evolution: Sketch for a New Model – A Speculation. Unfortunately, my sense is that Padelford sides with Wallace, not with the emergent model. Still, it's a good read.

Here are a few brief passages:

The most basic assumption underlying orthodox science is that the stuff of the universe is, well, stuff. It may be quarks, or super-strings, or something else, but it is something, some unit of matter and/or energy and/or space-time or something (some thing). This stuff then somehow combined and somewhere around 14 billion years after the Big Bang produced consciousness. The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness studies is How does it do this? That it does it, that matter/energy produces “your joy, your sorrow, your memories, your ambition, your personal identity” is not at issue. Whether it’s via a “vast assembly of nerve cells” (Crick), or a 40 hertz collapse of quantum waves in the micro-tubules within those nerve cells (Stuart Hameroff) or something else – however it happens, the general idea is that you start with matter/energy and end up with consciousness. To most contemporary researchers this is so obvious that it doesn’t rate a second glance. But it is exactly these “doesn’t rate a second glance” issues that rate not just a second glance, but a good, hard second, or even third, look. It is exactly these issues that constitute our underlying assumptions and need to be put on the table, since if they are faulty, then everything that follows from them is also faulty, or at least incomplete. (pg. 228)

And his refutation of this model begins as follows:

It’s certainly possible that a few hundred years hence our descendants will look at the universeas-machine model we have constructed with the same kind of bemused incredulity. In any event for the present I merely want to point out that this basic assumption—the stuff of the universe is stuff—has not been shared by a very long-standing tradition of both Eastern contemplation and Western mysticism, including some prominent practitioners of quantum physics. Within these traditions the basic stuff of the universe is not stuff, but rather consciousness, or mind:

There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
– Max Planck

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
– Sir James Jeans

This tradition, that of Idealism and its cousins, runs counter to our contemporary “common sense” view that the universe is made up of matter (or matter/energy). While it is off the main path of argument here, I would like to note one thing in passing. Namely “Mind creates the universe” is a nearly identical statement to “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Especially if God is consciousness.

Also in passing: Any universe we know, or can know, has a knower, an observer in it. Any fully objective universe, one which has no such an observer and therefore is devoid of subjectivity, while it may (or may have) exist (existed) is purely conjectural. And if consciousness is to any extent non-local, to be explained later, then this condition is impossible. Rerunning Descartes’ query, What can we know for absolute certain?, the contemporary answer, it seems to me, is Consciousness of stuff exists. So the universe we know has a conscious observer, and we know that this observer has observer affects via quantum physics (on which more later). Therefore the known universe is, in part, subjective. What we see is partly an effect of our seeing it. And even if that part may be a very small one, it also may, via the “butterfly effect,” leverage up into macroscopic effects of real consequence, or even (as we will touch on later) have calibrated the parameters of the pre Big Bang universe in such a way as to allow organized matter, life, and consciousness, to have come into existence in the first place. (pg. 229)

Of interest - one last long quote - are Padelford's 20 Tenets of Evolution:

Tenets of a New Model of Evolution

What follows are twenty tenets, broad organizing principles, of the model. These are the model’s bare bones, which I will subsequently flesh out a bit. In reading these one should bear in mind that, per hypothesis, they operate via the information/probability (IP) field effect, mentioned earlier.

1. Evolution is a phenomenon that takes place in hierarchically negentropic systems in general, and in life forms in particular.

2. Hierarchically negentropic systems are negentropic systems made up of, or constituted from, negentropic sub-systems, which themselves are made up of negentropic sub-subsystems, etc.

3. Hierarchically negentropic systems are characterized by interiority.

4. Interiority is that aspect of hierarchically negentropic systems which, if concentrated sufficiently, results in consciousness.

5. Thus matter does not create consciousness. Rather highly evolved hierarchically negentropic systems (i.e., advanced life forms) manifest consciousness.

6. The tendency of hierarchically negentropic systems to become more negentropic, with more layers of hierarchy over time constitutes evolution as seen from “outside.”

7. As seen from “inside,” interiority seeks to increase itself, which is to say, to become conscious, or more conscious.

8. Interiority is, to some extent, non-local.

9. In particular similar (or identical) hierarchically negentropic systems share a degree of interiority. This is the view from “inside” such systems.

10. The view from “outside” is that hierarchically negentropic systems probabilistically tend to adopt, or conform to, solutions found or chanced upon by similar systems.

11. The partial non-locality of hierarchically negentropic systems exists in terms of both time and space.

12. The deeper the hierarchy in hierarchically negentropic systems, the more non-locality is evident.

13. Lower levels of the hierarchy in hierarchically negentropic systems have causal effects on higher levels and vice versa.

14. Also, causal effects operate from exterior to interior and interior to exterior.

15. As reductionism only fully recognizes the former effects (lower to higher and exterior to interior), it is wrong, or at least incomplete.

16. Idealism, while not a major force in today’s world, makes the opposite mistake.

17. Up-to-down and in-to-out causality are, to some extent, the same thing, since systems with deeper levels of hierarchical negentropy embody greater degrees of interiority.

18. Likewise down-to-up causality is, to some extent, the same thing as out-to-in causality.

19. Taken to its logical end point, the ultimate hierarchically negentropic system would theoretically be totally non-local as to time and space and share an interiority common to all such systems lower in the hierarchy, including all life forms. The overlap between such an ultimate hierarchically negentropic system and what the religiously inclined call “God” is reasonably evident.

20. Because life continues to evolve, such an ultimate hierarchically negentropic system would logically also continue to evolve.

And here is his argument:

What I am attempting to do is to weave together the findings of various researchers such as Robert Jahn, Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake, Johnjoe McFadden and others, and apply my synthesis of these findings to the subject of evolution. Except where I express reservations, I accept their findings as valid. Those readers who want to make their own determination about such validity will need to study the work of these researchers as I don’t spend any time in persuasion or in countering critics, who are definitely out there. Those readers who have read and are unpersuaded by the work of these researchers are likewise unlikely to be persuaded by my analysis.

Some thinkers who, either by implication or explicitly, do not generally accept the finding of the above researchers, and to whom I situate the theory here in contrast, include the philosophers Evan Thompson, John Searle, and Dan Dennett, as well as the scientists Stuart Kauffman and Richard Dawkins. My disagreement with these gentlemen varies from partial to near-total as the narrative will disclose. The essay includes a section detailing my divergence from Kauffman and Thompson.

I am actually a fan of Evan Thompson, especially as he is carrying on the work of Francisco J. Varela in the realm of embodied consciousness -

that human cognition and consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, namely the body (understood both as a biological system and as personally, phenomenogically experienced) and the physical world with which the body interacts.

Essentially, Varela and Thompson hold to some form of "consciousness as an emergent property" approach, which is no doubt why Padelford disagrees with Thompson. Their theory is known as the "enactive approach," a nice introduction to which can be found in "The Feeling Body: Toward an Enactive Approach to Emotion," by Giovanna Colombetti and Evan Thompson:

The name “the enactive approach” and the associated concept of enaction were introduced by Varela and colleagues (1991) in order to describe and unify under one heading several related ideas. The First idea is that living beings are autonomous agents that actively generate and maintain their identities, and thereby enact or bring forth their own cognitive domains. An autonomous system, instead of processing preexisting information “out there” brings forth or enacts information in continuous reciprocal interactions with its environment. “Inner” and “outer” are not separate spheres, connected only through a representational interface, but mutually specifying domains enacted in and through the structural coupling of the system and its environment.

The second idea is that the nervous system does not process information in the computationalist sense. Information does not flow through a sequence of processing steps in a hierarchically organized architecture (typically divided into a perceptual, a cognitive and a motor layer). Rather, the nervous system is an autonomous system. It actively generates and maintains its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity according to its operation as a circular and reentrant sensorimotor network of interacting neurons.

The third idea is that cognition is a form of embodied action. Cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action. Sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment modulates, but does not determine, the formation of endogenous and dynamic patterns of neural activity. This activity, in turn, informs sensorimotor coupling, so that the whole embodied organism can be seen as a self-organized autonomous system that creates meaning.

The fourth idea is that a cognitive being’s world is not a prespecified, external realm, represented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of coupling with the environment. This idea links the enactive approach to phenomenological philosophy, for both maintain that cognition bears a constitutive relation to its objects. Stated in a classical phenomenological way, the idea is that the object, in the precise sense of that which is given to and experienced by the subject, is conditioned by the mental activity of the subject. Stated in a more existential, phenomenological way, the idea is that a cognitive being’s world—whatever that being is able to experience, know, and practically handle—is conditioned by that being’s form or structure. Such “constitution” on the part of our subjectivity or being-in-the-world is not subjectively apparent to us in everyday life, but requires systematic analysis—scientific and phenomenological—to disclose.

This is point brings us to the fifth and last idea, which is that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated in a careful, phenomenological manner. For this reason, the enactive approach has from its inception maintained that cognitive science and phenomenology need to be pursued in a complementary and mutually informing way (for detailed discussion of this point, see "Thompson, in press).

In summary, according to the enactive approach, the human mind is embodied in our entire organism and embedded in the world, and hence is not reducible to structures inside the head. Meaning and experience are created by, or enacted through, the continuous reciprocal interaction of the brain, the body, and the world. (pg. 55-56)

This is the theory that feels most "correct" to me, which is why I have become such a fan of Cultural Psychology - it also holds that consciousness is embodied in the relationship between the organism (as a whole) and its cultural/environmental context.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get this involved in the debate - I was just going to post a few quotes and a link to Donald F. Padelford's Consciousness in Evolution: Sketch for a New Model – A Speculation. Go read the article, but be open to the different perspective I have tried to offer. We don't which is correct, only which one feels "right" to our unique experience.

However, Padelford claim he has offered a way to falsify his theory, which is crucial to any approach that stands so far outside of the mainstream.

Tags: Donald F. Padelford, Consciousness in Evolution, Sketch for a New Model, A Speculation, Integral Review, Integral theory, science, consciousness, evolution, mind, Nature, epigenetics, B Alan Wallace, Hidden Dimensions, consciousness is an emergent property, Ontological Emergence, Epistemological Emergence, Tenets of a New Model of Evolution, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, embodied consciousness, enactive approach, Cultural Psychology