The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness by Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka argues that a type of complex learning they call unlimited associative learning (UAL) is a marker in the evolutionary record for the presence of minimal consciousness. The book really is almost two books in one. The first part of the book has a historical survey of thought on the origin of life and consciousness that places the modern scientific viewpoint on consciousness into perspective. The second part addresses their main argument with a review of species and research on learning. It also includes the author’s models of associative and unlimited associative learning.
I first became aware of this work from the SelfAware Patterns blog which has an excellent three-part post that summarizes the work. Previously I had arrived at my own conclusions about learning, consciousness, and evolution before encountering a paper by the same authors that summarizes the main arguments.
I like this book. First, I agree with its main point about their being an association between learning and consciousness. More about that later. Second, the book assembles in one place a lot of material and research and learning and consciousness across species which one might find valuable even if not convinced of the main thesis.
The “sensitive soul” of the title can be traced back to Aristotle who distinguished three levels of soul:
- Nutritive and reproductive soul possessed by all living organisms
- Sensitive soul possessed by animals that feel and have experience
- Rational soul possessed by human beings
Their main concern is to trace the evolutionary development of the sensitive soul to discover what types of animals possess some minimal consciousness.
The term “minimal consciousness” is used extensively throughout the book and identification of its presence is the book’s main quest. Unfortunately, I am not certain this term or more generally the idea of gradations of consciousness is well-defined. Consciousness as we generally use the term always is consciousness of something. The problem is that almost all conscious organisms as identified by Ginsburg and Jablonka see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Organisms do these things to varying degrees. Some birds can see magnetic force lines. Cats can see the ultraviolet. Bees see polarized light. Dogs can smell cancer. Bats and dolphins can navigate with echo location. Humans can do none of these things. In the sensual realm at least, do humans possess less consciousness than these other organisms? The contents of consciousness of a species are governed by the refinement of its sensual organs and the capability of its brain. Humans have consciousness not only of the sensual realm but also of a symbolic realm of language and abstract ideas. Does the symbolic realm arise from greater consciousness per se? Or, does it arise from unique, but unconscious, neurological capabilities in the human brain much like the bee ability to see polarized light is a product of special pigments in bee compound eyes? Does it make more sense to say organisms are conscious of different sorts of things based on their senses and brain without judgment on whether consciousness is greater or lesser in any organism?
Let us put aside that issue for the moment. Ginsburg and Jablonka argue that unlimited associative learning is a marker for consciousness. “Marker” seems to me to be somewhat of a weasel word. It is vague. It is saying there is association between learning and consciousness, but we are not actually saying what it is. On page 233, they ask the critical question: “How is this great expansion in the repertoire of learned behaviors and the cognition underlying it related to minimal consciousness?” In the paragraph that follows, they do not answer the question but return to their “marker” argument. Nowhere in their toy model for UAL is there a box for consciousness. No circle for consciousness surrounding some subset of functions. I cannot see anything in their model that requires consciousness.
Assuming UAL and consciousness are related, they could be related in the following ways:
- Consciousness enables UAL and is required for it.
- Consciousness and UAL are not causally related but when we get one, we get the other, perhaps because of some level of complexity in the brain.
- Consciousness and learning are the same process, similar processes, or both subsets of some larger process.
If the relationship is 1, we would expect to find a consciousness block somewhere in the diagram. If it is 2, then we are still missing something critical to explaining consciousness even if UAL gives us a key criterion for testing for its presence. If it is 3, then we could draw a big box or circle around the entire model and label it consciousness. Or we could say the model is a model of UAL and consciousness.
I lean mainly towards 3 with a hint of 1. I view consciousness as a system dedicated to aligning our mental representations with our inner states and the external world. This makes consciousness like learning since a key part of learning is achieving more useful representations of the world. I see major overlap between UAL and consciousness if they are not the same. It also might be that consciousness, to the extent it may be different from UAL, might be required for it.
Consciousness has causal power over our mental representations which guide our behavior. It may have direct control over neural circuits as some research with biofeedback suggests. Without causal efficacy, consciousness is reduced to an epiphenomenon and it is difficult to see how such a complex biological feature would emerge and persist across species through evolution. Learning is how this causal efficacy arises. This seems to be the view of Ginsburg and Jablonka, although I am not sure it is ever stated exactly like this in the book.
Finally, let me talk a little about a missed opportunity in the book.
If we step back and look at the big picture, we can see that the question of consciousness and its relationship to learning is actual a subset of the problem of how information accumulates in the world.
For the most part, everything in the world tends towards greater disorder, greater entropy. Locally in open systems, with external energy sources, pockets of order can emerge. Life itself is like this. Life does not break any law of physics, but as Robert Wright wrote: “Information is what allows life to defy the spirit, though not the letter, of the second law of thermodynamics.”
It is not entirely clear how this happens. If we knew how, we would understand the origin of life. I am not suggesting anything mystical, but we are probably missing some fundamental understanding of physics or chemistry.
Life is sometimes defined as entities that participate in the process of evolution by natural selection.
For Darwinian evolution to work, we need variation, selection, and ability to pass on traits. Variation means that entities can reproduce and when they do, they gradually change by mutation or otherwise. Selection means the changes can have consequences. Some changes result in fitter entities with better survival ability. Selection is by the eco-system in biological evolution. Finally, the entities must be able to pass on the changes.
Life itself – its genes and whatever else might carry information – uses information to multiply itself, to create its adaptive forms, and engage in adaptive behavior. Variation and selection produce new information -information for a better adapted organism and indirectly information about the ecosystem of organism. Leslie Valiant has compared the this evolutionary process to a computer learning algorithm except its performance evaluated against input it gets from a rather uncontrolled and unpredictable world.
If we return to Aristotle’s three souls, we see that each soul represents a stage in information accumulation that is driven by learning and evolution. The nutritive and reproductive soul evolves by a slow genetic learning process that requires generations for information to accumulate. The sensitive soul accumulates information through learning in near real time, in the life of the single organism, that can modify behavior for adaptive advantage. The rational soul takes learning into the symbolic realm to accumulate abstract knowledge and can record this information (because it is symbolic) to share it across generations.
In this light, the evolution of the sensitive soul and consciousness is one part of bigger trend and possibly a bigger mystery that began when life began.
Broad Speculations 
Tag, I’m it! Usually it is me getting complaints about all the books I recommend that people feel compelled to check out. So, my turn. Thus looks to be worth reading as the area is interesting to me, but at the current price I will be waiting a while. (Scholarship on the cheap is my watch phrase.)
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I’m not sure I’ve done justice to how much ground this book covers. It is a really great survey of most views on the topic combined with a great survey of the science.
Originally I was going to pair this with The Arthropod Brain which is another fantastic book but one that costs over $70. You would really have a problem with that one.
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BTW, just saw a Q&A with Bernard Baars at SciAm. Here’s a great quote from it that ties directly to my post:
“A great body of evidence suggests that conscious sensation and cognition provides the leading edge of moment-to-moment adaptation to the sensory, social, and conceptual world. Darwinian evolution occurs over generations, and by epigenetic expression it also regulates life development. But animals encounter very fast changes in the world, which are novel and ambiguous. To adapt to fast and ill-defined dangers and opportunities we need the brain.
Cortical sensory consciousness is believed to operate around 10 Hz, which is the theta and alpha range of brain oscillations. If you’re a rabbit confronted with a potential snake, you first have to run to safety, and then try to evaluate what you saw. The 100 ms domain (10 Hz) is a very useful dwell time for sensory input, and it’s also the sniffing rate of small, ancestral mammals. Biologically the 100 ms domain makes a great deal of sense, and consciousness is clearly biological. It has to have plausible bio-functions.
New evidence now also implicated the slower delta range. It is possible that these slow oscillations are modulated by beta and gamma oscillations that carry content, along with spatial arrays that are linked point-to-point by “labeled line” connections. This is a very exciting frontier.”
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/on-consciousness-science-and-subjectivity-a-q-a-with-bernard-baars/
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James,
I appreciate the link! Good write up!
On gradations of consciousness, I actually think the issue is that consciousness itself is not well defined. If we just think in terms of capabilities, it seems like there are more or fewer things a species can sense, including varying levels of acuity, but there is also more or less what meaning a species can extract from that sensory information, and there are more or less things a species can do with that information. For example, is a species without episodic memory as conscious as one with it? I’m not sure there’s a fact of the matter on this.
I interpreted their use of “marker” as an attempt at epistemic humility. I suspect if you asked them, they’d say their toy models, which include simplified versions of the functionality needed to support UAL, also include the functionality that provides minimal consciousness. But I do agree they could have been more explicit about it. They probably didn’t want to draw that line in the sand. I guess it could be seen as weaselly.
I see now how we’re on the same page as far as information and causality! Life, when viewed from the perspective of an individual organism, does seem to resist entropy. But ironically, life as a whole actually seems to increase entropy faster than if it didn’t exist. Not that, in the overall scheme of things, it makes that big a difference, since whatever life contributes (at least currently) is infinitesimal compared to what stars do.
I need to check out that Baars interview.
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The problem, however, is that finding “minimal” consciousness is seemingly what the book is about. So without a clear definition where does that leave us as far as finding it or not. Ultimately “minimal” consciousness must be become a neurological capability for UAL. So it is somewhat circular. Still valuable perhaps since they have done a good job of surveying species to find UAL and matching it to other things commonly found in checklists for consciousness.
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I took their seven attributes as an attempt at a working definition. Unfortunately, it’s kind of an ecumenical mish-mash, with the attributes operating at different levels of abstraction. And they don’t really tightly tie everything they talk about back to it.
Still, as you note, it’s a valuable book, with a wealth of information. The historical overview alone would have made a good book. And the toy models are worth being aware of, if for stimulating how we think about it if nothing else.
Read the Baars interview. Having read him at length, it’s pretty much stuff I’ve seen before. He has a tendency to wander around, both in interviews and writing. I’m not sure what to make of all the wave stuff. Most of the other stuff I’ve read ties consciousness to gamma waves, the category with the highest frequencies.
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Of course, the wave stuff caught my attention. More about that in some later posts. There seems to be something like waves in the brains of arthropods too.
Regarding “minimal” consciousness, maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it. But it seems to me it would be significant to understand how much of overall neurological capability is conscious and how much unconscious. If we graphed number of neurons vs capability, we could draw a line showing overall capability increasing with number of neurons. How would the conscious and unconscious components of that change as the line goes up? Does the conscious component become an ever greater part of overall capability or does the ratio stay close? If the first, then our consciousness is significantly greater than a spider’s and minimal consciousness makes sense. If the second, then most of our capability hasn’t really been an increase in consciousness so much as an increase in overall capability caused by increased neurons.
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Nice post Jim. I find no fault with this type of analysis as long as these observations are assessed in their proper context, and that context is mind, not consciousness. Conflating mind with consciousness in an exclusive architecture which is the common intellectual trap for both the materialist as well as the idealists. It’s a quagmire that nobody seems able to distance themselves from. The reason nobody can distance themselves from this intellectual trap reduces fundamentally to metaphysics. Without a grounding metaphysics, a metaphysics that unites mind and matter instead of dividing, well, you already know my position so I won’t carry on.
One’s culture is one’s world view. SOM has been the prevailing world view for over twenty-five hundred years (2,500). Add to that paradigm the advent of computers, programs and algorithms; and one now has the perfect storm for ignorance. According to this paradigm, the mind is seen as a organic computational mechanism and everything that is not a mind is an algorithm. It’s a nice, neat, tidy little package with holes in it large enough to drive a semi-truck through.
Idealists like Bernardo see those gaping holes. Idealists are personally offended and incensed that they are excluded from the table, and rightfully so. I respect Bernardo’s willingness to risk being an idealist over a materialist because at least idealism addresses the issue of causation instead of sweeping it under the table like materialists do. (Sorry, the big bang is an absurdity). The answer does not reside with materialism, nor does it lie with idealism. Just like any political debate, the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and that middle ground is the unification of mind and matter into a single manifold.
Peace
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Consciousness is information processing system. I’m conscious of something – I think about this something – I process information, retrieved from my memory, that is associated with this something. Learning is making changes in the associative memory. Consciousness is good in making changes in the memory, so consciousness is good at learning.
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