BD: Right. So are there any examples of an organism operating like a zombie?
SH: Well, I think we all can do that at times, actually. Like when I'm driving to work, I'm daydreaming about something, and I'm driving perfectly safely, but I'm not really conscious of the road. My mind's elsewhere. So I think we're all zombies when we are operating on auto-pilot, except that our consciousness still exists, just occupied elsewhere.
But if you're asking at what
level of evolution does consciousness appear, below which there is no
consciousness and living creatures are zombies, I wrote a chapter
about that. It's on my website. It's called "Did
Consciousness Cause the Cambrian Evolutionary Explosion?"
There was this huge burst of evolution like 500 million years ago,
and they don't really know what caused it. And the organisms at the
beginning were like these small worms and urchins, similar to urchins
and worms we have today--actinosphaerium and C. elegans,
actually, an urchin and a worm.
We know these organisms have
about 300 neurons in the case of the C. elegans. And in the case of
the actinosphaerium, it doesn't have neurons, it has axonemes, and
they have ironically almost the exact same number of microtubules as
the worm's neurons. So I think that is maybe when consciousness
first started, precipitating the evolutionary explosion.
But I think consciousness is a sequence of conscious moments which are a kind of spectrum, like photons. So you can have high frequency, high intensity, low wavelength moments versus low intensity, slower, less frequent events. Kind of like infrared versus ultraviolet photons, for example. At the low end, even an electron, if it was in quantum superposition and isolated, would have a conscious moment, but it would take 10 million years. On the other end, human brains can have them 40-80 to 100 times a second, even more. So it's a trick of isolating the superposition and allowing it to evolve and reach threshold for Penrose objective reduction/OR which is what causes consciousness..
Primitive organisms have some rudimentary consciousness, but not a whole lot of intelligence. But I don't think intelligence is really related to consciousness very much at all. We're intelligent, and we have consciousness. But if you're having an overwhelming toothache, there's not a lot of complex intelligence in that. It's just pure qualia. It's pure consciousness--of a very negative kind. You can also have blissful consciousness, that's positive, that's really devoid of content. In fact, meditators strive for that. So I think intelligence and consciousness are certainly not the same thing. But on the other hand, consciousness enhances intelligence.
BD: Right, so you could have a primitive organism that has consciousness but not a lot of intelligence. Or you could have a sophisticated computer that has a lot of intelligence but not consciousness.
SH: Exactly.
BD: Have there been any experiments done, or could there be any done conceivably, in which they took an organism that would normally have consciousness, like a mouse, and turned it into a "zombie" by blocking those factors that are responsible for consciousness but not neurocomputation--either through drugs, or gene manipulation, or whatever? And how would that effect the organisms behavior?
SH: I think they may have done it already. The conscious pilot model is about gamma synchrony moving around the brain. And if we're right, it moves through gap junctions. So they did these knockout mice, where they knocked-out the gene for connection 36, the main gap junction protein. And the mice survived exhibited behavior. But they were cognitively impaired. They weren't as smart. So in some sense, consciousness does feed back on intelligence. They do behave, and they function, and they have cognitive abilities. But no gamma synchrony. And maybe they're zombie mice.
BD: So if they are lacking consciousness, it would seem that without it, behaviorally they can still do the same sort of procedures, but they're not quite as sharp. They're lacking some sort of creativity or something.
SH: Yes. Something from consciousness contributes to intelligence. I agree. Now in Chalmers' strict definition of zombies, it's someone that's indistinguishable. But I think in fact, that might be impossible. I think in principle it's possible, but I agree with you. In almost all likelihood, consciousness would enhance intelligence. It would do things like you say: creativity, feedback. Absolutely. It's exactly what Roger Penrose described as non-computable. Something unpredictable. So if two primitive organisms are in a predator versus prey relationship, and one has non-computable processes, he's going to outfox the other one every time, because he's not going to be predictable. Otherwise, it would be like tic-tac-toe, and inevitable, but it's not.
BD: What are your thoughts on free will, and how do they relate to the two theories?
SH: Well the neurocomputational approach is basically this: if you measure evoked potentials that correspond to actions--in other words, you're hitting a tennis ball, and due to the evoked potential where the tennis ball is seen and the time you can hit it, you've already swung. And therefore they conclude that consciousness is epiphenomenal. That we act non-consciously on auto-pilot/zombie mode and consciousness happens after the fact. Yet we believe we act consciously. The party line is that we act unconsciously, reflexively, and have this false illusion after the fact that we had conscious control. And that's Dennett, Wegner--nearly everybody in mainstream neuroscience and philosophy says that. Therefore consciousness is epiphenomenal, we're merely conscious automata, as Huxley said, but also illusion. Because, then if you add Dennett's idea of multiple drafts in which what we call consciousness is merely stored memory, consciousness is illusion. So it may or may not bear any relation to what actually happened in terms of sensory processing. But you can't have free will in that scenario, because consciousness happens too late. So we're epiphenomenal. So neurocomputation: no, no free will.
Now, if you look at the work of Ben Libet, he did these amazing experiments in the "70s which seemed to show that conscious experiences is referred backward in time, about half a second in the brain. And I won't go into the experiments. You can read about it on my website in a paper called "Consciousness, Neurobiology, and Quantum Mechanics: A Case for a Connection." There's a section there on time and Libet and so forth. And Roger Penrose first picked up on this when he wrote that in quantum mechanics, what appears to be from our perspective backward time effects can happen. It might be more correct to say that in a quantum physics world, there's no flow of time. It's timeless. But from our perspective it appears that something's gone backwards in time, from the near future to the present. And in fact that's a main theory of quantum entanglement, on how quantum entanglement works, to account for non-locality. But in any case, the backward time effect, as shown by Libet experimentally, and Radin and Bierman in terms of presentiment and possibly a whole lot of other data that were generally ignored, may occur routinely.
There may actually be this backward time effect going on. And if that's the case, that allows consciousness to be occurring at the time the action is taken. Which means that quantum mechanics, and I think only quantum mechanics of some sort, can allow free will to actually occur. Because it puts consciousness in the here and now--the moment at which the action is taken. Consciousness can be real and in the here-and-now, but only with quantum mechanisms in the brain.
Now there's another problem with whether, okay let's say we have real time conscious control. There is still the issue of deterministic versus non-deterministic processes. And for that, Penrose comes in with non-computability, influence from Platonic information in the universe. In a sense that's also deterministic, although changing. But from this computational system, it appears non-deterministic. Which I think is the closest you can come to free will. The experience of acting in a way that's a combination of algorithmic processes, both classical and quantum, and at the moment of conscious choice, of collapse, of consciousness, some non-computable influence from--who knows, the Platonic realm, or somewhere. So it's the experience of the combination of those things that gives the sense of free will. And I think that's pretty good. I would take that.
