Robin Retallick offered some thoughtful feedback to my, “Why the Hard Problem of Appreciating Physical Reality?” Since discussing this has been one of my goals I’m going to turn his comment into an article and welcome others to add their thoughts.
I informed Robin of my plan and he said, go for it. With a thanks to Robin here it is. I started by copying and pasting his words into a document. I left his words complete, simply inserting a lot of breaks for me to share my perspective between his pushback.
Robin Retallick: “I think this longer explanation makes our point of disagreement much clearer.“I have no problem with your evolutionary story as an account of increasing biological complexity. Nor do I dispute the extraordinary correlations science continues to uncover between physical processes, brains, behavior and conscious experience.
“My problem is that your explanation begins by assuming the very architecture at issue.”
Cc: Please be precise: what do you see me assuming?
I quoted from scientific studies regarding elements and actions that are being observed and described.
Retallick: “You start with a fundamentally physical reality, assume that physical entities and their interactions”
Cc: “A” fundamental physical reality?
To be clear, there is only one physical reality, no matter how many alternate versions we humans can dream up in our imaginations.
The physical entities are there and their interactions are being observed and described.
What am I assuming?
Retallick: “contain the inherent capacity eventually to produce consciousness,”
Cc: … and you are telling me they do not? What do you base that on?
We have the hindsight to know that consciousness did evolve out of that, with absolutely no indication of any sort of supernatural intervention along the way.
More importantly that is not the wording I’d use, because teleology has no place in this. Plus “inherent capacity” makes it sound one-sided, when it all depended on interactions between self and environment (including other selves) and the surprising results that interactions can produce.
What I’m saying is that early entities had a Self, simply by physically existing — a key understanding is there was absolutely no sense of that Self.
Increasingly complex biology built the mechanisms that started registering the feelings and creating the sense of awareness, because increasing complexity also created a need for it and the race was on.
Does that distinction make sense? If not, why not?
Retallick: “and then use evolution to describe the increasingly complex mechanisms through which that capacity becomes expressed.”
Cc: Why do you take issue with that?
What do you think is being assumed?
I’m discussing observations scientists are documenting — “evolution” is a term describing change over time as it occurred on our planet.
Retallick: “But interaction isn’t awareness. Communication isn’t experience. Feedback isn’t feeling.
Cc: Okay, but feeling can’t happen without feedback. Experience is empty without something being communicated. Awareness is meaningless without interaction.
Retallick: “And increasing the complexity of any of them doesn’t, by itself, explain the transition.
Cc: How do you mean that? When I think of increasing complexity I think of a light sensitive spot on a single celled creature, evolving over generations of change into eyes that can see and process information for miles and miles. I could follow that with a hundred other examples. I appreciate that I am a product of half a billion years worth of generational refinement built upon cells with nearly four billion years of refinement.
Increasing complexity is everything.
Also, realize that increasing complexity isn’t only driven by our biology — it is the product of interacting & reacting to the constant changes on this dynamic geophysical Earth of ours.
So, I don’t understand what you think isn’t being explained.
Retallick: “Saying that “feeling like something” became evolutionarily advantageous explains why natural selection would favor it if it were available.”
Cc: I think that’s looking at it backwards. May I refer you to the work of Nick Lane — the following is from the epilogue to his recent book, “Transformer”:
Nick Lane’s “Transformer”, “Self” ¶14: I have long wondered if that collapsing membrane potential ‘feels’ like something to a bacterium.
More than anything else, the humming electrical potential on the membrane betokens the living force.
And if it feels like something for a bacterium to die, its living force sucked away, …
… “All operate through much the same mechanisms, collapsing electrical membrane potential to induce death. Presumably, there must also be some ‘pre-death’ state, where the living processes are tenuous.
Beyond that, membrane potential is needed for far more than the basics of ATP synthesis and CO2 fixation. It powers the bacterial flagellum, allowing cells to move around and seek better conditions, as well as pumping all manner of things in and out of cells, maintaining their homeostasis. …
All these states of living and dying are linked with electromagnetic fields.
Do they all feel different?
How could they not?
Metabolism and electromagnetic fields on the membranes bounding cells are intimately entwined and intrinsically meaningful.
These are the living states of cells, the stream of consciousness in its most elementary form.”
Retallick: “It doesn’t explain how a reality in which, as you put it, “nothing was at home to perceive, or care” acquired the capacity for anything to be at home at all.”
Cc: But it does. Without at least wrestling with the mind boggling reality of our deep time origins — one will never be able to see that.
It’s why I insist that becoming familiar with the reality of our evolution unfolding one day at a time is absolute essential for getting a realistic grasp on consciousness and our “Self” without the need for a magic something.
Retallick: “That isn’t making consciousness magical. It’s identifying the point at which your explanation changes categories without explaining the change.”
Cc: What should I make of that?
My article became so long because I specifically included descriptions of important biological inflection points that radically changed the direction of Earth’s evolutionary development.
It comes back to doing homework, the facts are out there: Robert Hazen — Hans Krebs — Peter Mitchell — Carl Woese — George Fox — Nick Lane — Michael Levin — Bonnie Bassler — Lynn Margulis — Martin Picard — Mark Solms — Antonia Damasio — Lisa Feldman Barrett — Arthur Reber — Michael Graziano — Marcus Abundis — David Quammen — Philip Ball — David Attenborough’s “Life on Earth” — of course, many more.
Retallick: “And there’s a deeper issue. Physical fundamentality itself isn’t an established scientific finding. Nor is there even an agreed definition of what “physical” ultimately means.”
Cc: Still, Newtonian physics dictates how things behave in our Earthly macroscopic world.
Retallick: “Yet your entire explanatory chain begins by granting physical reality ontological priority and interpreting everything that follows through that assumption.”
Cc: In a word: Yes!
This physical reality around us is all there is, besides human imagination.
If this Earth were not an “ontological” absolute — we, and it, would not be here to experience it.
If the Earth and its evolution weren’t absolute and exactingly consistent — if there were the slightest sloppiness in the physical parameters (the “clockwork” of infinite physical processes) of the world we observe, we would not be here to experience it.
It’s as simple as that.
Retallick: “So I don’t think the real disagreement between us is about evolution. Evolution can remain exactly where it is. The disagreement is about the nature of the reality within which evolution occurs.”
Cc: You would have to explain that. It sounds like you are talking about our personal perception of reality.
This is where the big split happens. From here on in, your arguments will depend on ideas that other smart people floated, then bounced off each other.
It’s what we humans do. You can’t imagine how much I miss some of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, earnest all night sessions with pals discussing deep thoughts and arguing about their implications.
But I came to realize all of that is about our “mind-scape.” I love it, but I put my trust in physical reality and actual lived experience. That’s why my impression of our human experience has boiled down to the following essence. I know it’s disturbing and won’t make me friends, but I’m past worrying about that. My concern is to speak my truth as well and clearly as I can. So here goes:
Theology is all about the glory of God and domesticating people.
Philosophy is all about the glory of our intellect.
Science is all about doing the best we can with what we have.
Retallick: “Your model says physicalness came first and eventually produced experience. Mine says physicalness is the “reality” story your consciousness creates plausibly based upon your beliefs and expectations.”
Cc: This brings us to:
Appreciating and respecting the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
I am an evolved animal. I am a perceiver, as opposed to the perceived. I perceive my reality the best I can with what I have. Same as it ever was, for every other living creature upon this planet.
Retallick: “The evolutionary evidence alone doesn’t decide between them.”
Cc: Of course, we each decide for ourselves what we choose to trust and believe in.
Retallick: “What AI is teaching us is that there’s a BIG difference between intelligence and consciousness, AI will soon easily surpass human intelligence and from a purely physical viewpoint, we are about to join the Neanderthals, because evolution will probably select for intelligence. Hence the need to give serious urgent consideration to what consciousness really is.”
Cc: I’m an old man, that’s all beyond my pay grade. At this point I’m strictly a one day at a time person. AI is real until the power grid collapses. When I look at how humanity is behaving, sorry at this point I need to check out, go for a walk on this land that surrounds me with as much appreciation and grace as possible, while I still can.
Thanks for the dialogue,
Cc
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