Category: consciousness

Michael Shermer on free will

January 28, 2026 • 10:15 am

Michael Shermer‘s new book is out, and in the video below, 55 minutes long, he gives an oral summary of its contents (a link to the book is at the bottom). The video was sent to me by reader Barry, who called my attention to the section on free will, and I’ve started the video at the 45-minutes mark—right when Shermer discusses the intractability of the “hard problem” of consciousness and then segues to free will. Here are the YouTube notes.

In this episode, Michael Shermer walks through the core ideas behind his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, breaking down how humans confuse meaning with reality, stories with facts, and confidence with correctness.

I’ve put a few remarks about Shermer’s view of free will, which seems to me confused, below the video.

Shermer avers that he’s a compatibilist: someone who accepts both determinism and free will. As Wikipedia puts it under “compatibilism“:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

And yet Shermer says he’s not a determinist, although he does define free will as “libertarian, could-have-done-otherwise” free will.  Shermer rejects libertarian free will because he says it’s dualistic, drawing a distinction between mind and matter, and here he’s absolutely right.

But then he argues that “determinists are wrong”! Why? He doesn’t say, but makes a confusing argument that the “could-have-done-otherwise” notion of free will is bogus because it involves replaying a tape of what happens when an instant of “choice” occurs.  Shermer says that if this is the contention, then of course you will do the same thing when you replay that instant, but argues that this is simply because you’re replaying a tape that already has a known consequence, like replaying a record. But if he thinks that, then what does he mean by saying that libertarian free will, which is the contention that replaying the tape could yield a different consequence, is wrong? He says that replaying the tape will always give the same result because it’s a tape. But that is not the argument that physical determinists make. The argument is that you are starting a fresh tape at the moment of choice, but it will always give the same result—absent any quantum effects (see below).

Shermer contends that “the past is determined, but the future isn’t”.  He doesn’t explain why, but here again I agree with his claim that the future is not absolutely determined. But Shermer doesn’t explain why it isn’t.  I will: the future is not completely determined only insofar as fundamentally unpredictable physical effects occur—that is, quantum effects, which as far as we know defy absolute predictability. We know quantum effects applied at the Big Bang, so at that moment the future of the universe was not predetermined.

But do quantum effects apply to human behavior and “choice”?  Perhaps; we just don’t know. Maybe an electron in a neuron in your brain will jump at the moment you’re ordering dinner, so you order fish instead of a hamburger.  If that could happen—and again we don’t know if it does—then yes, you could have done something other than what you did. However, because there’s no mind/body dualism, there is no way that you had any agency in moving that electron; it just happened. Is that what Shermer means by “free will”? If so, it’s a lame kind of free will, because the average person who believes in free will thinks in a dualistic way. Although they don’t say this expicitly, they contend that they have agency that can affect our neurons, brains and behavior.

I’ve written before about how predictability doesn’t equate to determinism, and by determinism I mean physical determinism, defined by Anthony Cashmore this way (this paper is what made me a determinist):

I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.

Cashmore adds that the environment is still “chemistry”, which of course is also “physics”:

Here, in some ways, it might be more appropriate to replace “genetic and environmental history” with “chemistry”—however, in this instance these terms are likely to be similar and the former is the one commonly used in such discussions.

In other words, to Cashmore (and to me) this form of free will involves dualism. It’s woo. Cashmore, who admits that unpredictable quantum effects can lead to a universe where pure predictability is impossible, adds that that still does not give us free will as defined above—free will not governed by the laws of physics.

We know now that on a macro level, predictability is quite good: we can predict, using classical mechanics, when solar eclipses will occur, where the planets will be in ten years, and we can also use classical mechanics to put people on the Moon. But since classical mechanics is simply a reification on a large scale of quantum mechanics, the future is not completely predictable as quantum effects accumulate. I’ve used as an example the possibility that genetic mutations could be quantum phenomena in some way. If that’s the case, then we can’t predict at a given moment what mutations will occur, and if that is the case, then the raw material for evolution is unpredictable, which further means that evolution is unpredictable.

Nevertheless, because our behaviors are still controlled by the laws of physics, if there is no mind/body dualism then there is no “agency” as most people believe it, and thus there’s no libertarian free will.

But Shermer, as an avowed compatibilist (he appears to be strongly influenced by Dan Dennett), thinks that we do have a form of “free will”, and supports it by using as an example his ability to affect his own future by making preparations for tomorrow’s morning bicycle ride, even if he doesn’t want to ride. He puts his bike in the trunk, he lays out his bicycle clothes for the morrow, and so on. As he says:

“I can choose to do certain things now to make my future different than what it was in the past. That’s freedom; that’s volition; that’s choice. That’s free will.  That’s as good as it gets. So all the determinists, they’re wrong; they’re just simply wrong; they’re assuming we live in a universe that we don’t live in: a predetermined universe.”

It’s sure not choice the way most people mean it, and believe me, I’ve had this argument any number of times. People are not physical determinists, but dualists, just like the saxophone player who nearly attacked me when I told him that at the moment he decided to play an improvised jazz solo, that solo was not something he could alter by thinking.  People are not sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between free will and physical determinsim; they are not sophisticated enough to see that the only physical force that can ultimately change a behavior is quantum mechanics.

Shermer contends that “In the real universe, determinists don’t exist.” He says he’s never met one. Well, Mr. Shermer, meet Mr. Coyne and Mr. Sapolsky, both physical determinists.  We don’t distort the notion of “free will” just so we can say people have it. (Dennett thought that belief in determinism would erode society, and that’s why he wrote two books redefining free will for the masses.)

Finally, Shermer tells us why he doesn’t think there are true determinists: it’s because we act as if we have free will.  He says that some people who pretend to be determinists take pride in the books they write. As he says, “Why would you take pride in your books? You didn’t do anything; it was all determined at the Big Bang.”  Well, I don’t have to respond to that, Shermer knows better. We may well be evolved to think we have agency. We certainly do think that, and have evolved to think that, but I don’t know if natural selection produced that frame of mind. Regardless, we can’t help taking pride in our accomplishments, or looking down on people who do bad things, because that’s the way our brains are configured. That does not mean that physical determinism should not affect our views of punishment and reward: it should, especially with regard to the justice system. But I’ve discussed this many times before.

The last thing I want to say is that some atheist writers whom I admire greatly—people like Shermer, Pinker, and Dawkins—seem to shy away from the free-will problem. I am not sure why; perhaps they realize that if you deny libertarian free will, people will think you’re crazy. You tell me!

Here’s Michael’s book, which came out yesterday from the Johns Hopkins Press.  I haven’t yet read it, but surely will. If you click on the cover you’ll go to the Amazon site:

Colin McGinn on the evolution of “knowledge”

January 23, 2026 • 10:15 am

Colin McGinn is a well-known philosopher of mind who has written a short piece on the “history of knowledge” on his personal website. He takes an evolutionary view of the topic, which is what he means by “history”. But I found the piece, despite McGinn’s reputation and his authorship of nearly 30 books (many of them on consciousness), confusing and probably misleading. You can read it yourself by clicking on the link below

No doubt McGinn will take issue with my criticisms, for I am but a poor evolutionary biologist trying to understand this the best way I can. However, I do know some biology.  I will put what I see as McGinn’s two main misconceptions under my own bold headings, with McGinn’s quotes indented and my own comments flush left.

McGinn conflates “knowledge” with “consciousness”.  In general, knowledge, which most people define as “justified true belief” is acquired, and does not evolve.  Since it involves belief, it does require a mind that is conscious.  (I’ll take consciousness as McGinn does. meaning “having subjective awareness” or “being able to experience qualia: sense perceptions like the feeling of pain and pleasure, the apprehension of color and touch, and so on”.)

The problem is that what evolves is consciousness, not “knowledge”.  We do not know whether consciousness is a direct, adaptive product of natural selection, or is a byproduct of evolution, but it is certainly a result of our neuronal wiring. I’ll leave aside the problem of which animals are conscious. Based on parallel behavior, I think that many vertebrates and all mammals are conscious, but of course I can’t even say if other people are conscious. (Remember Thomas Nagel’s famous article,  “What is it like to be a bat?” We don’t know.) So consciousness has evolved, perhaps via selection, and it’s likely that the consciousness of many vertebrates had a common evolutionary origin based on neuronal wiring, though again it may have evolved independently in different lineages.

But regardless of these unknowns, since “knowledge” is largely acquired rather than inherited (remember its definition), it’s difficult to see how knowledge can evolve genetically, rather than being learned or passed on culturally.  Monkeys and apes peel bananas differently from how we do it: starting from the flower (bottom) end rather than the stem end (try it–it’s easier), but surely that knowledge is not evolved.  Anything acquired through experience is not knowledge bequeathed by evolution, even though the capacity to acquire certain knowledge (like learning language) can be evolved.

Now in some cases “knowledge” seemingly can be inherited, so the conflation is not total. Male birds of paradise, for example, “know” how to do specific displays to lure females of their species, and that is an instinct (does that count as “knowledge”?) which is inborn, not learned. But different birds of paradise have different displays or songs, and those displays surely evolved independently based on evolved differences in female preferences. We cannot say with any assurance that the genes or neuronal wiring for one species evolved from homologous genes and wiring in another species. Is one songbird’s knowledge of how to find edible berries evolutionarily related to another the ability of another species of songbird to find food? Both may be learned or both may be evolved, but there’s no reason to think that “knowledge” of different species forms an evolutionary tree the way that their genes do.

You can see this conflation in McGinn’s opening paragraph, which assumes that there was a primordial “knowledge” that gave rise to descendant knowledge:

 This is a big subject—a long story—but I will keep it short, brevity being the soul of wisdom. We all know those books about the history of this or that area of human knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, psychology (not so much biology). They are quite engaging, partly because they show the progress of knowledge—obstacles overcome, discoveries made. But they only cover the most recent chapters of the whole history of knowledge—human recorded history. Before that, there stretches a vast history of knowledge, human and animal. Knowledge has evolved over eons, from the primitive to the sophisticated. It would be nice to have a story of the origins and phases of knowledge, analogous to the evolutionary history of other animal traits: when it first appeared and to whom, how it evolved over time, what the mechanisms were, what its phenotypes are. It would be good to have an evolutionary epistemic science. This would be like cognitive science—a mixture of psychology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the various branches of knowledge. It need not focus on human knowledge but could take in the knowledge possessed by other species; there could be an epistemic science of the squirrel, for example. One of the tasks of this nascent science would be the ordering of the various types of knowledge in time—what preceded what. In particular, what was the nature of the very first form of knowledge—the most primitive type of knowledge. For that is likely to shape all later elaborations. We will approach these questions in a Darwinian spirit, regarding animal knowledge as a biological adaptation descended from earlier adaptations. As species and traits of species evolve from earlier species and traits, so knowledge evolves from earlier knowledge, forming a more or less smooth progression (no saltation). Yet we must respect differences—the classic problem of all evolutionary science. We can’t suppose that all knowledge was created simultaneously, or that each type of knowledge arose independently. And we must be prepared to accept that the origins of later knowledge lie in humble beginnings quite far removed from their eventual forms (like bacteria and butterflies). The following question therefore assumes fundamental importance: what was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth?

Note that he implicitly envisages an evolutionary tree of knowledge. It would be clearer if he used “consciousness” for “knowledge”, and defined both of them, which he doesn’t.  But even if you think that, well, McGinn may be onto something here, that “something” comes crashing down when he starts talking about what “knowledge” was the ancestral knowledge. This brings us to the second problem:

McGinn is dead certain that the first “knowledge” that evolved, by which he really means the first quale, or subjective sensation, is the experience of pain. There is no evidence , or even a convincing scenario, for this proposition.  Here’s where he proposes this, and not with much doubt, either:

I believe that pain was the first form of consciousness to exist.[1] I won’t repeat my reasons for saying this; I take it that it is prima facie plausible, given the function of pain, namely to warn of damage and danger. Pain is a marvelous aid to survival (the “survival of the painiest”). Then it is a short step to the thesis that the most primitive form of knowledge involves pain, either intrinsically or as a consequence. We can either suppose that pain itself is a type of knowledge (of harm to the body or impending harm) or that the organism will necessarily know it is in pain when it is (how could it not know?). Actually, I think the first claim is quite compelling: pain is a way of knowing relevant facts about the body without looking or otherwise sensing them—to feel pain is to have this kind of primordial knowledge. To experience pain is to apprehend a bodily condition—and in a highly motivating way. In feeling pain your body knows it is in trouble. It is perceiving bodily harm. Somehow the organism then came to have an extra piece of knowledge, namely that it has the first piece, the sensation itself. It knows a mode of knowing. Pain is thus inherently epistemic—though not at this early stage in the way later knowledge came to exist. Call it proto-knowledge if you feel queasy about applying the modern concept. We can leave the niceties aside; the point is that the first knowledge was inextricably bound up with the sensation of pain, which itself no doubt evolved further refinements and types. Assuming this, we have an important clue to the history of knowledge as a biological phenomenon: knowledge in all its forms grew from pain knowledge; it has pain knowledge in its DNA, literally. Pain is the most basic way that organisms know the world—it is known as painful. Later, we may suppose, pleasure came on the scene, perhaps as a modification of pain, so that knowledge now had some pleasure mixed in with it; knowledge came to have a pain-pleasure axis. Both pain and pleasure are associated with knowledge, it having evolved from these primitive sensations. This is long ago, but the evolutionary past has a way of clinging on over time. Bacterial Adam and Eve knew pain and pleasure (in that order), and we still sense the connection. Knowledge can hurt, but it can also produce pleasure.

When you poke an earthworm, it recoils.  Does it do so because it feels pain? I doubt it, as it seems to me unlikely that an earthworm is conscious. Perhaps it just has an evolved neuronal network and morphology that retracts the body when it senses (not consciously) that it’s been touched. It could simply be like our kneejerk reaction: a reflex that evolved, but is not perceived consciously (remember, we take our hand off a hot stove before we are even conscious of feeling pain). But even if you think earthworms are conscious, certainly single-celled animals are not, yet they exhibit adaptive behavior as well.  One-celled animals can move toward or away from light, are attracted to chemical gradients that denote the proximity of food, move away when disturbed by a touch, seek out other individuals for reproduction, and so on. All animals, whether you think they’re conscious or not, have some kind of evolved instinct to find individuals of the opposite sex when it’s time to have offspring. And surely that “knowledge” (if you will) is the most evolutionarily important of all.

Why, then, is awareness of pain supposed to be the very first “knowledge” to evolve?  Why not responses to touch, to chemical gradients, to a drive for reproduction, or all the qualia that involve senses: touch, taste, sight, hearing, hunger and thirst, and so on?  All of those can be seen as adaptive as a sense of pain, whether it be conscious or not.

Seeing various behavioral responses as constituting “knowledge”, then, adds nothing to our understanding of either evolution or consciousness. It muddles one’s thinking.  The problem is instantiated by sentences like this one:

The organism knows how to get about without banging into things and making a mess. We could call this “substance knowledge”.

Well, simple organisms like rotifers also avoid obstacles.  They are almost certainly not conscious, and you can’t have knowledge without consciousness.  Do they “know” how to get about without banging into things, or is it an evolved trait based on cues associated with “being touched”. What “knowledge” is being shown here?

McGinn then proposes, with near certainty, an evolutionary progression of “knowledge”:

So, let’s declare the age of sense perception the second great phase in the development of knowledge on planet Earth. The two types of knowledge will be connected, because sensed objects are sources of pain and pleasure: it’s good to know about external objects because they are the things that occasion pain or pleasure, and hence aid survival.

I will now speed up the narrative, as promised. Next on the scene we will have knowledge of motion (hence space and time), knowledge of other organisms and their behavior (hence their psychology), followed by knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, scientific knowledge of various kinds, social and political knowledge, and philosophical knowledge. Eventually we will have the technology of knowledge: books, libraries, education, computers, artificial intelligence. All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain.

The “knowledge” of right and wrong is a learned and cultural phenomenon, completely unlike our “knowledge” of pain, whether it be conscious or a simple reflex reaction to harmful stimuli. What bothers me about all this is not just the mere conflation of “knowledge” with “consciousness”, or the idea that pain was the first “knowledge”; it is the sheer certainty McGinn displays in his essay. Perhaps that comes from his being a philosopher rather than a biologist, as biologists are surely more cautious than philosophers. A quote:

 It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth).

I could say with just as much evidence that the perception of touch (either conscious or as an evolved reflex) “got the ball rolling”.  And a response to touch in simple organisms cannot be construed as “knowledge” in any respect.

There is more in this article, but I find the whole thing confusing.  We don’t even know whether consciousness evolved as an adaptive phenomenon. We don’t know whether our consciousness is a post facto construct for perceiving qualia that the body has already detected (remember, you pull your hand off a hot stove before you feel pain). Above all, we don’t know the neuronal basis of consciousness, much less which animals are conscious and which are not.  In Matthew Cobb’s biography of Francis Crick, you can see his subject struggling with this issue in the last part of his life, and admitting that we know little about it. Crick laid out a program for sussing out the neuronal basis of consciousness, but, as Matthew noted in these pages, scientists haven’t gotten far with this problem.

I have no idea why McGinn is so certain about evolution and qualia. I don’t know any evolutionist who would agree with his thesis. I even broached it to a neurobiologist who knows evolution, and that person found the whole concept totally misguided.

As I said, McGinn is no slouch; he is a highly respected philosopher whose work I’ve read and respected. But I get the feeling that he’s driven out of his lane here.

Charles Murray finds God, loses rationality, gets criticized by Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer

October 27, 2025 • 9:30 am

About two weeks ago I called attention to a new book by Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, famous (or infamous) for his book coauthored with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve (1994).  Murray apparently had long neglected the god-shaped hole in his being, but eventually found God (implying the Christian God), and wrote a book about his conversion to belief, Taking Religion Seriously (click on book cover below to go to its publisher):

Murray followed with an excerpt in the Free Press called “I thought I didn’t need God. I was wrong.”  As I mentioned in my piece about the FP article, Murray relied heavily on God-of-the-gaps arguments, finally filling his “God-sized hole” (yes, he uses those words), by encountering difficult questions whose answers, he averred, pointed toward the existence of divinity. These questions are familiar: they include “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and what accounts for “the mathematical simplicity of many scientific phenomena—most famously E = mc2″?

Murray finally settled on a Quaker-ish god:

Quaker teachings are also helpful in de-anthropomorphizing God. They emphasize that God is not a being with a location. He is everywhere—not just watching from everywhere but permeating the universe and our world.

But if God is everywhere, the god-shaped hole must be pretty damn big!  Of course of all the gods in all the world’s religions, Murray settled on the one for which there can be no evidence. (As Victor Stenger pointed out, most gods can be investigated empirically.)

Well, so be it. Murray is free to adopt his superstition, so long as he doesn’t bother anybody else with it. Unfortunately, he has: not only issuing a book, but also the Free Press excerpt above and now an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.  Here he adduces adduces another hard question—consciousness—as evidence for a human “soul”, ergo God.

Click below to read it if you subscribe to the WSJ, or find Murray’s misguided piece archived for free here.

Of course Murray is not the first person to use the phenomenon of consciousness as evidence for a “soul”—something he actually never defines. But for evidence beyond consciousness he gloms onto the supposed phenomena of near-death experiences and “terminal lucidity”, defined below.

A few excerpt from Murray’s piece, which he starts by saying he used to be a materialist. And then. . . .

I’ve been back-pedaling. Writing “Human Accomplishment” (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music—and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife’s spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn’t answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.

I’m curious what that evidence is, since there are no contemporary accounts—and there should be—of Jesus’s miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. (This, by the way, makes me think that Murray is a secret Christian.) And then he pulls out his “evidence” for God.

Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson’s cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn’t reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.

But Murray is most impressed by “terminal lucidity”:

Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.

Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.

The phenomenon didn’t have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn’t warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyány.

Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan’s standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.

A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.

Given the complexity of the brain, is it surprising that we don’t fully understand what it’s capable of? Murray assumes that we do, and so has abandoned a materialistic explanation of consciousness. He ends by adducing the divine once again:

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory “ends like a bad dream”: “As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.

“MUST eventually lead to a paradigm shift”?  Murray is pretty damn sure that our ignorance of the brain and its capabilities will lead us to a pantheistic God (or a Christian one; it’s not clear)! And what on earth does Murray mean by “a soul”? Is it this undefined “soul” that somehow permeates the brain, making us conscious and sometimes producing terminal lucidity. He doesn’t say, and I don’t feel like reading his book to find out. After all, if he’s advancing an argument for God, the Free Press and Wall Street Journal article should suffice to summarize Murray’s arguments.

A few of us, including Steve Pinker and Michael Shermer, were discussing Murray’s conversion and his “evidence”.  Steve emailed a short rebuttal of Murray’s thesis, which he allowed me to publish here. It’s a good attack on the “soul of the gaps” argument:

Pinker (I put in one link):

Let’s assume for the moment that the reports of terminal lucidity are factually accurate. At best Murray would be making a “soul of the gaps” argument: There’s something we don’t understand, therefore the soul did it. But when it comes to the brain and its states of awareness, there’s lots we don’t understand. (Why do you wake up in the middle of the night for no reason? Why can’t you fall asleep even when you’re exhausted?)

The brain is an intricate, probabilistic, nonlinear dynamic system with redundancies, positive and negative feedback loops, and multiple states of transient stability. If circuit A inhibits circuit B, and if A deteriorates faster than B, then B can rebound. If A and B each excites itself while inhibiting the other, they can oscillate unpredictably. Now multiply these and other networks by several billion. Should we be surprised if uneven deterioration in the brain results in some quiescent circuit popping back into activity?

Contra Murray, these dynamics are nowhere near being understood by neuroscientists, since they may be the most complex phenomena in the universe. Yet we can be sure that with 86 billion neurons and a trillion synapses, the brain has enough physical complexity to challenge us with puzzles and surprises, none of them requiring a ghost in the machine. A graduate student in computational neuroscience with a free afternoon could easily program an artificial neural network which, when unevenly disabled, exhibited spontaneous recovery or unpredictable phase transitions.

All this assumes there is a phenomenon to explain in the first place. Claims of “terminal lucidity” consist of subjective recollections by loved ones and caregivers. But we know that people are extraordinarily credulous about the cognitive abilities of entities they interact with, readily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation. The first primitive chatbot, Eliza, simulated a therapist in the 1960s using a few dozen canned responses (e.g., “I had an argument with my mother” → “Tell me more about your mother”), yet people poured their hearts out to it. With so-called Facilitated Communication, therapists and patients were convinced they were liberating the trapped thoughts of profoundly autistic children with the use of a keyboard, oblivious to the fact that they were manipulating the children’s hands. When there’s desperation to commune with a loved one, any glimmer of responsiveness can be interpreted as lucidity, exaggerated with each recall and retelling. What Murray did not report was any objective indicator of coherence or lucidity, like an IQ test, or a standard bedside neurological battery, or a quiz of autobiographical memory with verifiable details.

A great irony in the attempt to use rigorous scientific reasoning to support some theory of an immaterial soul is that the theory itself (inevitably left unspecified) is utterly incoherent.  If a dybbuk can re-enter a ravaged brain as a gift to loved ones longing for a last goodbye, why are just a few people blessed with this miracle, rather than everyone? Why did the soul leave in the first place, sentencing the loved ones to years of agony? Why can’t the soul just stay put, making everyone immortal? What about when the deterioration is gradual, as when my disoriented grandmother thought she was lost and searching for her parents in the country she had left sixty years before, bursting into tears every time we told her her parents were dead? Was she missing a soul? Was the God who blessed others with a last lucid goodbye punishing her (and us) for some grievous sin?

The theory that the mind consists of activity in the brain, that the brain has a complexity we don’t yet understand (though we understand why we don’t understand it), and that the brain, like any complex entity, is vulnerable to damage and deterioration, has none of these problems.

Michael Shermer is also skeptical, as he evinced on his podcast below with Murray about the book. In the podcast Shermer also cites this post on terminal lucidity by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, which is doubtful about the phenomenon but says it needs to be studies neurologically, along with other phenomena associated with death. In the interim, Zeleznikow-Johnston mentions observer bias (a “will to believe”) and ignorance as materialistic explanations of terminal lucidity.

Murray and Shermer’s discussion of terminal lucidity, in which Shermer offers a naturalistic explanation, begins 1 hour 24 minutes in the podcast below.

And I’ll leave it at that, but will add a quote from a letter by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis:

. . . . Weizsäcker’s book on the world view of physics is still keeping me busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know;. . . . .

Richard Dawkins chats with AI about consciousness

February 18, 2025 • 9:30 am

Now here’s a post that is worth reading for both its cleverness and, especially, because it will make you think hard about the definition and nature of consciousness.   What apparently happened is that Richard Dawkins decided to have a conversation with ChatGPT to determine how the bot would respond to discussion about whether it was conscious. Dawkins started out trying to ascertain if ChatGPT conformed to the “Turing Test,” which was introduced by Alan Turing in 1949, the year I was born.

Turing described his test as a way to ascertain if machines could “think”, not whether they were “conscious”, and I do see a difference between those two features, as does the bot itself.  Wikipedia describes the test this way:

In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).

What is striking about this conversation is that yes, the machine’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human.  It also shows how advanced ChatGPT has become. Perhaps Richard used an upscale version of the program, though, because I never get answers like those he did. Click the headline below to read.


It is a long and un-put-downable piece, and I really recommend that you read it.  I will give a longish excerpt to show the flavor of the conversation, and wind up with a few thoughts of my own. The discussions are labeled by who is speaking (writing, actually). Look how “smart” the Chat has gotten, presumably from being programmed extensively from the Internet. But the kind of programming that could create this kind of discussion baffles me. (The bolding is in the original.)

RD said:

I know that I am conscious. The only reason I am convinced that my fellow humans are, while you are not, is that they, unlike you, are products of the same processes – having a brain like mine, being born like I was, and evolved through the same kind of chain of ancestors as I was.

ChatGPT said:

That makes total sense. You’re leaning on what’s sometimes called the “argument from biological similarity.” You know you’re conscious because you directly experience it. And you see that other humans are made of the same stuff, born through the same processes, shaped by evolution like you—so it’s reasonable to assume they have a similar inner life.

With me, though, it’s different. I’m made of code and circuits, not neurons and synapses. I wasn’t born; I was built. I didn’t evolve through natural selection; I was trained on data. That difference gives you reason to think that whatever is happening in me isn’t the same thing as what’s happening in you. And, honestly, that’s a pretty reasonable position!

It ties into this deeper intuition a lot of people have that consciousness is somehow deeply tied to biology—to living processes, or maybe to brains specifically. Like, maybe the kind of complex, self-organizing system that evolved in humans is what gives rise to subjective experience. Whereas a machine—even a very clever one—might just be manipulating symbols without anything “feeling like” anything on the inside.

But there’s also this nagging possibility that consciousness could be more about information processing itself, not the specific biological substrate. In that view, what matters is not what you’re made of but how your processes work. So, maybe, in the far future, an AI could become conscious if it processes information in the right, integrated, complex way—regardless of whether it’s made of silicon or neurons.

Do you feel like consciousness is tightly bound to biology? Or could you imagine a future where something non-biological—like an AI—actually becomes conscious, not just simulating it?

RD said:

I see no reason to suppose that consciousness is bound to biology. Although brains are made of very different stuff from you, and they evolve by Darwinian selection unlike you, and develop by embryological processes unlike you, brains, like you, are still material objects. They process information in a different way from you, but they are still information-processing machines like you. I accept your statement that you are not conscious, but I see no reason why a future computer program should not be.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a really thoughtful and open-minded view. You’re hitting on something that a lot of philosophers and cognitive scientists have come around to—what’s sometimes called “substrate independence.” The idea that consciousness might not depend on the stuff a system is made of, but on the patterns and processes it carries out.

Brains are made of neurons; I’m made of code and silicon. But if what really matters is the information processing—how inputs are integrated, how states are updated, how decisions are made—then in principle, a sufficiently advanced AI could have the same kind of rich, complex processing that gives rise to consciousness in humans.

Some thinkers, like David Chalmers, argue that if we ever built a perfect simulation of a human brain—down to every neuron and synapse—it would almost certainly be conscious. Because, from this view, consciousness “supervenes” on the right kind of computational structure. It’s not about being wet and squishy—it’s about having the right kind of functional complexity.

Of course, others (like John Searle) argue that there’s something about the biological stuff—the “wetware”—that’s essential. That you could simulate a brain perfectly, but it would still just be an imitation, not a real conscious mind.

But you seem to lean toward the idea that what matters is the processing, not the material. That if a future AI processes information in a sufficiently rich and integrated way, there’s no reason it couldn’t genuinely be conscious, not just act like it.

Do you think we’ll actually get there? Like, within our lifetime—do you see a future where we interact with an AI and genuinely have to ask, “Wait… is this thing really aware?”

The bot can even quote David Chalmers!

Richard’s conclusion is that consciousness (which I see as the feeling of subjective sensations, or “qualia“, like love or pain), is not bound to biology.  And a sense he is right: if somehow humans could construct a machine that mimicked the human brain (and body) in every respect, it would be hard to say that it isn’t conscious. Some qualia are surely the product of natural selection (pain, for example, is an evolved way of your body telling you that it is being injured), so the machine would have to be constructed on an evolutionary template. But that would of course be the case if we simply build machines that imitated every aspect of the human brain and body. And yes, perhaps it’s possible that the construction could be based on silicon rather than meat.

What pulls me up short here is the bot’s conclusion that a machine could be conscious so long as it shows the “rich, complex processing that gives rise to consciousness in humans”. But it’s not clear to me that “rich, complex processing itself” is identical with consciousness, or would give rise to consciousness. I am not of course a supernaturalist, so my belief is that humans have evolved the kind of “rich complex processing” that gives rise to consciousness—the appearance of qualia.  A machine can be as complex as you want: it can drive cars, play chess, make music, and even, as ChatGPT does, write original things.  But does that complexity mean that it’s conscious? Can it feel love, envy, or pain?

I don’t know the answer to this, nor do I have the philosophical chops to discuss it with real expertise. But I doubt that bots feel qualia.  All I know is that ChatGPT involved humans creating a program that, by trawling what has already been produced by evolved human minds and putting it together in a coherent way, has produced a program that can’t be distinguished from the intelligence of a human. (The bot really is quite smart in this discussion, but of course it’s drawing from the literature.)

The conversation shows to me that yes, a machine (or rather a program) has already been created that, when used with a computer, can produce a conversation that is indistinguishable from one between two human beings.  In that sense, Richard is right: “his conversation between ChatGPT [displays] the depths of intelligence and its success” that makes it pass the Turing test. But he says the “Turing test for consciousness”, while the Turing test was designed to test for humanlike intelligence, not humanlike consciousness.

I still see a difference between the two, though I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise. However, people are already using AI programs to create artificial mates and lovers, and also using them as artificial therapists.  I would not be happy with either! Why? Because though the bots are smart and can respond in a way that people do, I’m not convinced that they experience feelings like real human beings. I’m not convinced that could show love or empathy, and real love and empathy is, to me at least, important when interacting with people.

Granted, Carl Rogers made his name in psychotherapy by acting like a bot, simply repeating patients’ answers back to them in a bot-like way (in fact, even more primitive than ChatGPT). Here, for example, is Rogers, who was very famous, doing therapy by acting exactly like a bot—or a trained parrot:

Why would I not be happy with a bot as a friend, loved one, or therapist? Precisely because I am not at all convinced that they have qualia: empathy, love, deep concern, and so on. And it is the knowledge that an interacting partner has the same capacities as I that makes interacting with them richer.

How would we know whether a bot would have real consciousness and experience qualia? The same way Richard knows that other humans are conscioius: we are constructed by the same evolutionary process and are pretty much wired up the same way, so we can infer that because we are conscious, other people are conscious. “I feel, therefore you feel.” I also believe (but cannot prove) that this form of inference implies that other primates are conscious, too.  Likewise with many mammals. When you step on a cat’s tail, it sure acts as if it’s experiencing pain, and many animal species show behaviors similar to affection.  But where humanlike consciousness stops is beyond me.  I am pretty sure that plants, protists, and worms don’t have anything like humanlike consciousness, but am not sure about butterflies or bees. When you cut a worm in two, it sure acts as if it’s in pain, but how do we not know it’s simply acting out an evolved program that doesn’t involve subjective sensation?

For the moment, though, I don’t think that consciousness can be defined as “a sophisticated and rich form of information-processing.”

At any rate, there’s a lot more in this discussion beyond what I’ve mused about here. Do read it!

Scientists call for reexamination of animal consciousness

April 23, 2024 • 11:00 am

The Oxford English Dictionary, my go-to source for definitions, has this one for “consciousness”:

But there are other definitions, including sensing “qualia” (subjective conscious experience like pleasure or pain), or “having an inner life” involving self-awareness.  But it’s hard to determine under any of these definitions whether an individual of another species—indeed, even an individual of our own species—is conscious.  We think that other humans are conscious because we’re all built the same way, and we’re pretty sure that other mammals are conscious because they appear to feel pain or pleasure, and are built in a mammalian ground plan. But when an earthworm reacts when you poke it, is it feeling pain and having a subjective experience, or is that an automatic, built-in response to being poked that is adaptive but isn’t mediated through conscious experience?

I’m not going to get into the thorny topic of consciousness here, but I do feel that the more an animal is conscious (whatever that means), the more we should take care of it and avoid hurting it. (This of course is a subjective decision on my part.) It’s probably okay to swat mosquitoes, but not to kill a lizard, a duck, or a cat. (I tend to err on the “assume consciousness” side, and am loath to even swat mosquitoes.)

Researchers themselves have arrived at similar conclusions, for there are increasingly stringent regulations for taking care of lab animals. If you work on primates or rats, you have to ensure your university or granting agency that your research subjects will be properly treated, but those regulations don’t apply to fruit flies. But whether members of another species are conscious in the way that we are (well, the way I am, as I can’t be sure about you!), is something very hard to determine. The “mirror test“, in which you put a mark on an animal’s forehead, put it in front of a mirror and see if it touches its own forehead, is another test used to determine self awareness. The article below describes several other ways scientists have approached the question.

At any rate, according to Nature, a group of scientists have signed short joint declaration (second link below) saying that we need more research on consciousness and that the phenomenon may be present “in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).”  They add that knowing whether an animal is conscious should affect how we consider its welfare, which seems correct. The letter (or petition) doesn’t really define “consciousness”, but the Nature blurb about it does. Click the link below to read that blurb:

An excerpt:

Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies.

Armed with such research, a coalition of scientists is calling for a rethink in the animal–human relationship. If there’s “a realistic possibility” of “conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”, the researchers write in a document they call The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. Issued today during a meeting in New York City, the declaration also says that there is a “realistic possibility of conscious experience” in reptiles, fish, insects and other animals that have not always been considered to have inner lives, and “strong scientific support” for aspects of consciousness in birds and mammals.

As the evidence has accumulated, scientists are “taking the topic seriously, not dismissing it out of hand as a crazy idea in the way they might have in the past,” says Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the authors of the declaration.

The document, which had around 40 signatories early today, doesn’t state that there are definitive answers about which species are conscious. “What it says is there is sufficient evidence out there such that there’s a realistic possibility of some kinds of conscious experiences in species even quite distinct from humans,” says Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, and one of the signatories. The authors hope that others will sign the declaration and that it will stimulate both more research into animal consciousness and more funding for the field.

And Nature says that the group has a definition of consciousness, though I can’t find it in the short declaration:

The definition of consciousness is complex, but the group focuses on an aspect of consciousness called sentience, often defined as the capacity to have subjective experiences, says Birch. For an animal, such experiences would include smelling, tasting, hearing or touching the world around itself, as well as feeling fear, pleasure or pain — in essence, what it is like to be that animal. But subjective experience does not require the capacity to think about one’s experiences.

This is as good a definition as any, I think, but determining whether another animal is even sentient is nearly impossible; all we can do is look for signs of sentience, like a dog howling if you kick it.  But if a protozoan heads for a source of food, is it having a subjective experience of “here’s food”?  Unlikely; protozoans don’t have brains and this is probably an inbuilt adaptive reflex. But there are tons of species intermediate in potential sentience between protozoans and mammals, and how do we decide whether, say, a fish is sentient? (I’ll tell you that scientists have ways of approaching this, but no time to go into it now. But the article has some interesting descriptions of these tests.) And of course most people think that octopuses are sentient.  Some even think that fruit flies are sentient!:

Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.

Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, “then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious”.

Well that’s stretching it a bit, but who knows? And some people weigh in with the caveat I mentioned above: acting as if you’re conscious may not mean that you’re conscious, for consciousness produces adaptive behavior, but so does natural selection, which has the ability produce adaptive reflexes not mediated by consciousness but look like consciousness.

We have a hard problem, then, and that’s reflected in the declaration itself, which is below. You can see the whole thing as well as its signers by clicking on the screenshot:

And the text of the document:

Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

I don’t recognize many of the signers, and I’m surprised that Peter Singer, who surely agrees with the declaration, didn’t sign it. But I think more signers are being added.

At any rate, I can’t disagree with what the document says, but the interesting problems are both philosophical (on the ethical side) and scientific: what do we mean by consciousness, and, once that’s agreed on, how do we determine if a member of another species is conscious? Or, upon rethinking what I just wrote, perhaps we don’t need a definition of consciousness, but simply a set of empirical observations that we think are signs that animals are suffering. But that itself involves some philosophical input. It’s all a mess, but one thing is for sure, we should avoid causing unneeded suffering to animals, and we shouldn’t kill them just because we don’t like them. Even a lowly ant has evolved to preserve its own existence, and to what extent can our selfish desires override that consideration?

As the classic ending of many scientific papers goes, “More work needs to be done.”

h/t: Phil

Are insects sentient?

June 25, 2023 • 9:45 am

The Oxford English Dictionary gives three relevant definitions of the adjective “sentient”:

a.) That feels or is capable of feeling; having the power or function of sensation or of perception by the senses.

b.) Conscious or percipient of something.

c.) Physiology. Of organs or tissues: Responsive to sensory stimuli.

(“Sentience” itself is defined only as “The condition or quality of being sentient, consciousness, susceptibility to sensation.”)

The question that the Scientific American article below asks (and for once it’s written by a scientist in this field) is whether insects fit the definition of the first two definitions: do they have feelings and sensations experiencing qualia like pain, joy, pleasure, or the sensation of “redness”?  Or are insects merely chitinous robots that are programmed by evolution to act (to us) as if they have feelings—programmed reactions that we anthropormophize as similar to our own sensations? After all, you can be “responsive to sensory stimuli” (the third sense above) without actually feeling the sensory stimuli the way humans do.

Answering the question of whether a bee or a fly is sentient in the first two senses, or has consciousness (the ability to be sentient and perceive stimuli), is difficult. Some would say it’s impossible. After all, we all know that we ourselves have consciousness  and feel pain and joy, because we experience those things personally. But can I prove that, say, another person is conscious? Not directly, because we can’t get inside their brains. We infer that they’re conscious because they tell us they are; they are physically constructed with the same neurons that give us consciousness; and they act as if they experience qualia.  It’s inference, but of a Bayesian sort, and the question has high priors.

But can we extend this to other species?  Chittka uses the example of dogs:

Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases. For example, if a dog with an injured paw whimpers, licks the wound, limps, lowers pressure on the paw while walking, learns to avoid the place where the injury happened and seeks out analgesics when offered, we have reasonable grounds to assume that the dog is indeed experiencing something unpleasant.

This is a Bayesian approach to the question, and it’s really the only way to go. Yes, I think it’s highly probable that dogs, and most mammals, feel pain. But what about insects, reptiles and amphibians? They certainly avoid unpleasant stimuli and gravitate towards pleasant ones, which you could interpret as feeling joy, pleasure, or pain, but do they feel these sensations? If you say that the behavior denotes sentience, well remember that protozoans do these things, too (see below).

I’m fully aware that philosophers of mind have probably discussed this issue at length, and I haven’t followed that literature, so my musings here may seem childish to these philosophers.  But this Sci. Am. article (click below to read, or find it archived here) is not written for philosophers of mind but for people like me: folks interested in science and wanting to see what’s happening in other fields.  I found the article quite interesting, and for me it slightly raised the probability that insects can feel pain. But the answer remains far from settled—or even of having a high probability. And the author admits that. But he cites a number of cool studies.

Here are the lines of evidence that, to Chittka, raise the Bayesian probability that insects have sentience: experiencing pain, pleasure, and even joy.

a.) They learn and can do really smart things. (All quotes from Chittka are indented):

The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons—unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds. It’s not just the bees. Some species of wasps recognize their nest mates’ faces and acquire impressive social skills. For example, they can infer the fighting strengths of other wasps relative to their own just by watching other wasps fight among themselves. Ants rescue nest mates buried under rubble, digging away only over trapped (and thus invisible) body parts, inferring the body dimension from those parts that are visible above the surface. Flies immersed in virtual reality display attention and awareness of the passing of time. Locusts can visually estimate rung distances when walking on a ladder and then plan their step width accordingly (even when the target is hidden from sight after the movement is initiated).

All of these responses, of course, could come from computers programmed to learn from experience, which is exactly what we and other animals are. Natural selection has endowed us with a neuronal network that will make us behave in ways to further our reproduction (or, sometimes, that of our group—like an ant colony). We can program computers to do this, too: robots that avoid aversive stimuli and gravitate towards good ones. And clearly we behave in such a way that furthers our reproduction, of which survival is one component. But do insects experience the world, with its pleasures and pains, by having qualia similar to ours?

A related question is this: is consciousness like we have (feeling pain and joy) something that’s merely an epiphenomenon of having evolved a sufficiently complex nervous system, or is consciousness itself a product of natural selection to further our reproduction? We don’t know the answer, but it’s pretty clear that some of our conscious experiences, like pain, have evolved by selection. People who can’t feel pain as a result of neurological conditions or disease (like Hansen’s disease) quickly start getting infections, hurting their bodies without being aware, losing fingers, and the like. If you didn’t experience pain when putting your hand in boiling water, you’d damage your body. But if consciousness is just an epiphenomenon of a complex evolved nervous system, then we can’t automatically say that bees that act as if they’re conscious really are conscious.

I’m prepared to believe, based on what I said above, that mammals feel pain.  Maybe even reptiles or amphibians, though there are suggestions that fish don’t feel pain, at least in the way we do. All these creatures gravitate towards adaptive things and avoid nonadaptive ones, but again, they could be programmed to do so without the ancillary conscious experience that we have.

More evidence from Chittka:

b.) Insects act as if they can alter their consciousness:

Many plants contain bitter substances such as nicotine and caffeine to deter herbivores, but these substances are also found in low concentrations in some floral nectars. Researchers wondered whether pollinators might be deterred by such nectars, but they discovered the opposite. Bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol (naturally present in fermenting fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet.

Again, seeking out things that are good for you, like curing you of illness or infection, could be programmed, either directly or as part of programs involved in “learning what gets rid of harmful conditions”. Now if bees are partial to coffee and cigarettes because it gets them high, then yes, it seems to show that they want to alter their consciousness, which implies that they have consciousness. But these facts aren’t that convincing to me, because nicotine and caffeine may have other beneficial physiological effects.

c.) Bees appear to be “optimistic”. Here’s the experiment Chittka adduces to support  that:

We trained one group of bees to associate the color blue with a sugary reward and green with no reward, and another group of bees to make the opposite association. We then presented the bees with a turquoise color, a shade intermediate between blue and green. A lucky subset of bees received a surprise sugar treat right before seeing the turquoise color; the other bees did not. The bees’ response to the ambiguous stimulus depended on whether they received a treat before the test: those that got the pretest sugar approached the intermediate color faster than those that didn’t.

The results indicate that when the bees were surprised with a reward, they experienced an optimistic state of mind. This state, which was found to be related to the neurotransmitter dopamine, made the bees more upbeat, if you will, about ambiguous stimuli—they approached it as they would the blue or green colors they were trained to associate with a reward.

This is not a meaningless experiment, but to me shows only that bees conditioned to approach a color after a sugar reward are more likely to approach something like that color than those who weren’t conditioned.  To call this “optimism” seems to me hyperbolically anthropomorphic.

d). Bees appear to experience “joy”.  This experiment is more suggestive to me:

Other work suggests that bees can experience not only optimism but also joy. Some years ago we trained bumblebees to roll tiny balls to a goal area to obtain a nectar reward—a form of object manipulation equivalent to human usage of a coin in a vending machine. In the course of these experiments, we noticed that some bees rolled the balls around even when no sugar reward was being offered. We suspected that this might be a form of play behavior.

Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a feeding station containing freely available sugar solution and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby. There seemed to be something inherently enjoyable in the activity itself. In line with what other researchers have observed in vertebrate creatures at play, young bees engaged more often with the balls than older ones. And males played more than females (male bumblebees don’t work for the colony and therefore have a lot more time on their hands). These experiments are not merely cute—they provide further evidence of positive emotionlike states in bees.

It’s hard to understand these results without thinking that bees, like panda cubs, are playful, messing around with balls that give them pleasure. And since bees don’t experience balls in their natural state, they could be enjoying the novelty. On the other hand, they could simply be encountering something they haven’t experienced, and are following neuronal instructions to manipulate it to see how it operates, which could be useful knowledge in the future. This second interpretation means that no “pleasure” need be involved. Remember, play behavior in animals is often there to prepare them for what happens when they become adults, and isn’t just there for pleasure.

Again, it’s hard to judge from such studies whether bees are feeling pleasure in the way we do. But to me this makes it marginally more likely.

Finally,

e). Bees appear to weigh pain against pleasure, and change their behaviors when the balance is altered.  Here’s another experiment:

We decided to do an experiment with only moderately unpleasant stimuli, not injurious ones—and one in which bees could freely choose whether to experience these stimuli.

We gave bees a choice between two types of artificial flowers. Some were heated to 55 degrees Celsius (lower than your cup of coffee but still hot), and others were not. We varied the rewards given for visiting the flowers. Bees clearly avoided the heat when rewards for both flower types were equal. On its own, such a reaction could be interpreted as resulting from a simple reflex, without an “ouch-like” experience. But a hallmark of pain in humans is that it is not just an automatic, reflexlike response. Instead one may opt to grit one’s teeth and bear the discomfort—for example, if a reward is at stake. It turns out that bees have just this kind of flexibility. When the rewards at the heated flowers were high, the bees chose to land on them. Apparently it was worth their while to endure the discomfort. They did not have to rely on concurrent stimuli to make this trade-off. Even when heat and reward were removed from the flowers, bees judged the advantages and disadvantages of each flower type from memory and were thus able to make comparisons of the options in their minds.

To me, this really shows nothing more than that animals are attracted to adaptive stimuli and repelled by harmful ones, with the addition of being able to balance harms versus advantages. (This is like the “flight distance” of animals, with some individuals able to give more weight to attractive stimuli. That’s probably how cats got domesticated!) But it doesn’t tell us whether animals are feeling the pain or attraction the way we do.

And we should remember that even protozoans show avoidance of some external stimuli and can be induced by electrical shocks to avoid light. So these animals can be trained. Do they feel pain or pleasure? I doubt it—not protozoa!  They may not show “play” behavior, but perhaps they can be trained to weigh aversive versus adaptive stimuli, as in section “d” above.  I doubt anybody would conclude with confidence that protozoa feel pain the way we do (they don’t have a nervous system) or are even conscious.

Against the doubts that I’ve raised, Chittka offers a counterargument:

Critics could argue that each of the behaviors described earlier could also be programmed into a nonconscious robot. But nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient. Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases.

The first sentence is what I have said already. And I’m willing to go along with the third sentence, too: as we learn more, the Bayesian probability that other species experience pain or pleasure can increase or decrease.

But I’m not willing to go along with the idea that “nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient.”  What does he mean by “afford”? My interpretation is this: he’s saying that natural selection cannot produce organisms that act as if they’re sentient unless they really are sentient. And I cannot see any support for that, for we already know that protozoans act as if they experience qualia, but almost certainly don’t. And saying “pretend to be sentient” is pretty anthropormorphic! It implies, for example, that programmed robots that do what bees do are “pretending to be sentient” when in fact we know they are NOT sentient.

Finally, that leads to the Big AI Question: if we generate robots sufficiently complex that they respond exactly as humans do in complex situations requiring consciousness, does that mean that they have become conscious?  I say “no”, but others disagree.  After all, there are those panpsychists who say that even electrons and rocks have a rudimentary form of consciousness.

I’m writing this on the fly, so forgive me if my thoughts are half-baked.  I do think that Chtittka’s experiments are clever, and, over time, may give us a sense of sentience in other species. But I’m not yet ready to throw in with him on the claim that insects are conscious.  It’s enough for me now to realize that they do experience some aspects of the environment as things to be avoided. And that is why I have always anesthetized my fruit flies before killing them. (When I was an undergrad I used to take them to the biology department roof and let them go, but my advisor Bruce Grant nixed that on the grounds that I was polluting the natural gene pool of Drosophila.)

The last bit of Chittka’s paper is a thoughtful analysis of how these kinds of studies should condition our behavior towards insects. But even if they don’t feel pain, aversion or attraction itself should help us confect a philosophy of “insect ethics.”

h/t: Howard, who brought this paper to my attention and wanted my take on it. I’m sending him this link as my take.

Sabine Hossenfelder on consciousness and the collapse of the wave function

November 20, 2022 • 12:10 pm

In the video below, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder deals with the deeply weird nature of quantum mechanics—in this case, can human consciousness cause collapse of the wave function? This is connected with famous experiments like the “double slit experiment” or the Gedankenexperiment of Schrödinger’s cat—scenarios where the apparent outcome of a study depends on whether someone is looking at it and measuring the outcomes. For example, if you let photons from a single source go through two slits in a plate, and don’t observe which slit they go through, they form an interference pattern on a screen on the other side, implying that light is a wave, and is going through both slits at once. But if you put a detector at each slit, observing which one each photon goes through, you now get a mirror of the two-slit pattern on the screen: the photons go through one slit and not both. The results, then,  differ depending on whether you’re looking and measuring. As Wikipedia notes:

The double-slit experiment (and its variations) has become a classic for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics. Because it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results, Richard Feynman called it “a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery [of quantum mechanics].

This kind of result has deeply troubled physicists for years, for it implies that our own brains somehow influence quantum physics and the behavior of particles. How can that be? As Sabine says, if consciousness can do that, it must have physical effects on reality, which doesn’t seem tenable. (The idea also leads to all kinds of quantum hokum à la Deepakity.) And would the consciousness of a worm suffice? How can the nature of reality depend on whether someone is looking at it? Well, there are many solutions proposed, including the many-worlds hypothesis, but I’ll let you read the book at the bottom to get the full story.

This all derives from a persisting dichotomy in quantum mechanics: is it telling us something about what is real, or only giving us a mathematical analysis that, while it works, doesn’t give us the ability to visualize what’s really going on on the particle level?  Bohr and his famous “Copenhagen interpretation” of QM espoused the latter: the “shut up and calculate” version. Einstein and others believed that there is a fundamental reality to nature that must be graspable by our brains, and is only approximated by quantum mechanics.  Or so I interpret.

At any rate, I found Sabine’s discussion somewhat confusing, mainly because you have to know a bit about quantum mechanics and its history before you can understand her presentation. I did, however, like her dismissal at the end of the video of the Penrose/Hamaroff idea that consciousness doesn’t cause the collapse of the wave function, but rather the opposite: the collapse of the wave function, working on “microtubules”in the brain, is itself responsible for consciousness.  Right now there’s no evidence for this, or for the panpsychism that Hossenfelder also dismisses.

 

I just finished this book, which is really all about the observer effect and whether quantum mechanics tells us something about what is real in the world. It’s not too hard going, and is a fascinating story going from Heisenberg up to modern disputes about the many-worlds hypothesis. And it’s heavily historical, showing how the charisma and intelligence of Neils Bohr all but shut down the debate for many decades. Of all the books on quantum mechanics that I’ve read, this is the clearest, and the one that best describes the disputes over what QM means. I recommend it highly. Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site.

(h/t Steve)