An excursion

This being the story of an excursion starting from the encyclopaedia entry at reference 1, sent to me by the people at reference 2.

The wrapping

Academia are a slightly odd bunch, who despite appearances are a for-profit operation supplying all kinds of academic work to the world at large and there are paying options through which you can contribute to that profit. However, what I get is free, which includes their sending me email notice of all kinds of stuff, some decidedly odd, some interesting looking, some downloaded and read, as in this case.

With this being an entry about the origins of consciousness in a encyclopaedia published by a publishing operation called SAGE, with the two volumes mine for £350. The question is, who would buy such a thing? Haven’t print encyclopaedias been more or less killed off by their online competitors, in particular by the ubiquitous Wikipedia? Is it very much more than a bit of thinly disguised vanity publishing by the 335 contributors? Read all about it at references 4 and 5.

Noting in passing that print encyclopaedias do still have a place in my world, a world where there is a lot of useful knowledge out there which is more or less static and which can be well encapsulated, by respectable writers, in print: I still use my copy of Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, published in the mid 50’s of the last century; it still earns its three feet of shelf space. That said, the cost of production of a good encyclopaedia of this sort must now be hard to recoup in revenue. The days of unscrupulous door to door encyclopaedia salesmen are long gone – at least I imagine that they are.

This author’s home, UNBC, certainly does exist and is the University of Northern British Columbia, headquartered at Prince George, gmaps 53.8925809, -122.8122997, although search of their website, reference 6, does not reveal a Gregory Nixon. They do own to a Tommy Nixon, seemingly a star in their basketball team, the Thunderbirds.

The parcel inside

The SAGE entry itself is a respectable six pages in Acrobat format, giving a summary of the state of play on consciousness studies, although one which gives rather more space to quantum theories than I would have. I came away with two interesting leads. One was about the extent to which children reared without significant contact with other humans would be conscious. The second, closely related, was the extent to which the social needs of a very social animal drove the evolution of consciousness. To what extent those needs made us what we are today.

Note that we are not saying here that one is only properly conscious when interacting with others, rather that there might need to have been plenty of such interaction in the past in order to be able to be conscious now. A lot of which interaction would be delivered in the case of a normal upbringing, within the family or family surrogate and by means of school, that is to say, collective, education. 

The first lead led me, through Wikipedia – which showed great concern for the variety of animal involved in rearing a wild child in the forest – to the cases known under the names of Anna and Isabelle, with the former and to a lesser extent the latter documented at references 7 and 8. Anna was kept shut up in an upstairs room of a farm house from around the age of 1 to the age of 6, at which point she was discovered and removed into care. She died of jaundice at the age of 10, somewhat recovered but still badly handicapped. Something of the same sort happened to Isabelle, but she received proper after care and made a much better recovery.

Apart from the shock of finding out that such things go on, a reminder that a child needs to interact with others, children and adults, if it is to grow up properly, to learn language and behaviour. Withdraw all such interaction and you get a very reduced child. With correspondingly reduced consciousness. Consciousness which is present, but impoverished; rather closer to the experience of an animal than it should be.

The second lead led me to Rochat of reference 10, a plea for the importance of interaction with conspecifics in development. An argument that looking at brains from the inside, as it were, was not enough. An argument dressed up as comment on reference 11, more about what is now called theory of mind, when children acquire it and whether other primates acquire it. Does one chimpanzee know that another chimpanzee does not know where the banana is?

More complicated kinds of knowledge

In the beginning, children learn about things. What they look like, what they feel like and what they taste like. This sort of knowledge can be modelled in a straightforward, largely visual way in a layered data structure like that proposed for LWS-R of reference 12. Consciousness is present, but a bit thin by the standard of a normal adult.

Moving on, children learn about other people, perhaps about other animals. Living beings with agency, which move about and do stuff; moving about which the child will start to predict – including here both the movement itself and the consequences. Living beings which might be somewhat like oneself, both outside and inside. Predictions which help one make one’s way in the world. Which are useful. All this entails a rather more complicated sort of knowledge, what might, aping the jargon of logicians, be called second order knowledge, knowledge which includes the sort of thing included under the rubric ‘theory of mind’. With knowledge of the minds of others perhaps being a precursor of knowledge of one’s own mind, of oneself. From where I associate to something a three year old girl once told me, at the end of a tantrum: ‘I’m not angry any more. I’ll go and see Granny now’ – very suggestive of self knowledge.

So suppose we have three conspecifics, three agents: A1, A2 and A3. A1 is the subject, the child in question. Various possibilities for A1 follow, possibilities involving the other agents, involving things denoted by symbols like ‘T1’, deeds (or actions) by symbols like ‘D2’ and propositions about things or people by symbols like ‘P3’.

A1 knows both that the proposition P1 is true and that A2 believes proposition P2 to be true, where not both P1 and P2 can be true. Where P1 might be the brick is red and P2 might be the brick is blue.

A1 knows that A2 is trying, but not succeeding in doing action D1. Where D1 might be reaching down the banana hanging from the door handle.

A1 knows that A2 is looking at thing T1. Where T1 might be the attractive looking sweet on the plate on the floor.

A1 knows that A2 has looked at thing T1 and, in consequence, knows that A2 knows both that there is a T1 and where it is.

A1 knows that if he throws thing T2 out of the pram, it is likely to smash on the floor and A2 will be angry. Where T2 might be a container with drink in it.

A1 knows that if he throws thing T2 out of the pram, it will smash. He then does this both for the pleasure of the action itself and for the pleasure in the consequence, in his prediction coming true.

If A1 knows that proposition P1 is true, he has probably forgotten that yesterday he believed P2 to be true, where, once again, not both P1 and P2 can be true. Propositions live in the present and have no past.

A1 saw A2 put T1 into T2. Therefore A1 knows that A2 knows where T1 is.

A1 saw A2 put T1 into T2, out of sight of A3. Therefore A1 knows that A3 does not know where T1 is.

A1 manipulates the behaviour of A2, perhaps towards some T1 or perhaps away from some T2, by making intelligent use of some knowledge of A2, perhaps a desire, a need or a fear. Perhaps by using something that A2 desires as bait. Or something that A2 fears as deterrent.

A1 manipulates the behaviour of A2, perhaps towards some T1 or away from some T1, by some kind of distraction.

A1 thinks that P1 is true of A2. But A1 knows that this is a bit uncertain, that he may turn out to be mistaken. But it is worth a punt, it is worth trying to trick A2 by exploiting the presumed truth of P1.

It seems quite plausible that A1, as he progresses through this kind of series, comes to be more fully conscious, more conscious of his own mind, than when he started out with the colour of the bricks on a playboard. A matter which will be chased more thoroughly in a post to come.

A cautionary tale 

Substantial involvement with adult conspecifics is needed for the development of language in a child. It may well be that either or both of language and substantial interaction with conspecifics are needed for the development of full consciousness – whatever exactly that might turn out to mean – in a growing child. 

But these needs are bounded by the fact that what feels like full consciousness can be generated by an adult, more or less at will, without involving either language or interaction with conspecifics.

This can be demonstrated along the following lines. Stop doing anything else. Spread the right hand in front of one, palm down. Stretch the fingers out, fan the fingers out, as far as they will go, concentrating on various sensations arising from the muscles of the fingers, then relax. Keep doing this, rhythmically, at a rate of around once every two seconds. There needs to be still and quiet, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether the eyes are open or shut.

The argument here is that this exercise generates the experience of full consciousness, rather more than that of the colour of bricks on a playboard, mentioned above, but without needing language, either interior or articulated, or interaction with conspecifics. I dare say the Buddhists of reference 13 who do meditation can manage without the hand movement.

A variation is to do something of the sort with the lower jaw, which despite its better blocking of stray inner verbal thought, does not seem to work as well. Perhaps the greater flexibility of the hand as a whole and the greater number of muscles involved in the hand exercise make a difference.

Conclusions

An excursion which will be continued by development of the list of activities of agent A1 begun above.

Can these activities be expressed using the notation of mathematical logic?

Can these activities be expressed in the layers of LWS-R of reference 11?

What the important milestones in that development?

More particularly, what more can we say about what consciousness gains from the interaction of the subject with conspecifics? To what extent is that interaction necessary for the normal development of consciousness?

References 

Reference 1: SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Psychology: Origins of Consciousness – Gregory Nixon, UNBC – 2016.

Reference 2: https://www.academia.edu/. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia.edu. 

Reference 4: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/home. Attempts to visit the US site seem to have been blocked.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAGE_Publishing. 

Reference 6: https://www.unbc.ca/. 

Reference 7: Extreme Social Isolation of a Child – Kingsley Davis – 1940.

Reference 8: Final Note on a Case of Extreme Isolation – Kingsley Davis – 1947.

Reference 9: Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness – P. Rochat – 2009. Not taken up. Too expensive.

Reference 10: What does it mean to be human? - Philippe Rochat – 2006. 

Reference 11: Primate theory of mind: A state-of-the-art review - Jill Byrnit – 2006. 

Reference 12: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html. 

Reference 13: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/03/buddha-rules.html. 

Reference 14: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/horton-observation.html. Containing a stray observation on the consciousness, or not, of a dog.