Mechanism behind consciousness
A Clear Description of the Mechanism Behind the Emergence and Functioning of Consciousness
This article presents its own explanation of consciousness and should be read as an idea and conceptual framework intended to potentially lead to new insights.
The emergence of consciousness constitutes one of the greatest breakthroughs in evolution. It marks a fundamental transition: from non-intelligent animals with fixed behavioral patterns to intelligent animals with a much broader behavioral repertoire.
Before the emergence of consciousness, animals functioned according to fixed behavioral patterns, comparable to automatons. An illustrative example is flies: because they have not evolutionarily adapted to artificial light, they continue to circle around it aimlessly. Their behavior is largely genetically predetermined and only limitedly adaptable through individual learning, while fundamental changes in that behavior arise only through natural selection and inheritance over many generations.
Later in evolution, intelligent animals appeared, such as birds and mammals. This required a strong increase in the brain’s information-processing capacity without a proportional increase in size, which would have been impractical. This becomes clear in crows: despite their small brains, they display remarkably intelligent behavior. This suggests that nature has developed an efficient mechanism that makes high intelligence possible with relatively limited resources.
Hypothesis
Nature has developed a mechanism that allows brains to deliver significantly greater performance without increasing in size. This mechanism consists of the brain’s ability to program itself. As a result, brains can function at a much higher level than mere fixed stimulus–response reactions. In neurology, this ability is explained, among other things, by the concept of neuroplasticity.
For every new problem, the brain temporarily creates a “program” that is specifically tailored to that situation. This is far more efficient than, as with an automaton, having all required behavioral rules and solutions predefined and stored in memory. Such a memory would be unfeasibly large even for the human brain.
This process of self-programming is what we call thinking. When a new problem arises, the brain “comes up with” a solution. And during this thinking, consciousness arises naturally. Thinking and consciousness are the same entities. Consciousness is not a separate function, but a by-product of the process of thinking itself.
If we ever succeed in building a computer that functions in this way, it will be able to think and will presumably also acquire consciousness. In its early stages, that computer will, incidentally, be rather autistic.
Sources
- Global Workspace Theory — Bernard Baars
- Global Neuronal Workspace Theory — Stanislas Dehaene
- Predictive Processing / Predictive Coding — Karl Friston
- Bayesian Brain Hypothesis — Geoffrey Hinton
- Higher-Order Thought Theory — David Rosenthal
- Neural Reuse Theory — Michael Anderson
- Adaptive Resonance Theory — Stephen Grossberg
- Self-Organizing Brain Theory — Hermann Haken
- Free Energy Principle — Karl Friston
- Embodied Cognition Theory — Francisco Varela