Cats and consciousness

Rick Darby at Reflecting Light (my favorite name of any blog I know) reflects on the wonders of the domestic cat. I posted several comments, on the mystery of cat consciousness; on why the Darwinian theory of evolution not only cannot explain the existence of cats, but cancels out what is most interesting about them; and on why sentient life itself is incompatible with Darwinism. Mr. Darby’s post should be read on its own, but I’ve revised my comments and posted them below.

First LA comment:

Trying to explain the complex mysterious behavior and consciousness of cats (or of any sentient being) as the result of random genetic mutations which are selected only because they help the possessor have more offspring is a losing endeavor. There’s infinitely more at work here than survival and reproduction. Darwinism is a terrible obstacle and distraction to any attempt to understand and relate to the phenomena of sentient existence.

The other day I was in a store in my neighborhood where a gray cat hangs out. I got down next to it and petted it, then it turned over and allowed me to stroke its belly, then it got up and walked a few steps away, then it stopped and turned its head to the side, looking back at me, or so it seemed. The way it turned its head back was captivating, in a way I can’t describe. I felt I was seeing a glimpse of the cat’s selfhood, its consciousness, though the nature of that consciousness remains a mystery. Cats “own” themselves in a way no other creature does. They are the ultimate masters or mistresses of their own domain, complete within themselves.

Second LA comment:

If creatures and their qualities really came into being by Darwinian processes, they could have no consciousness, all the things about them that express consciousness are just illusions. The only thing that is real about them is mechanical behaviors that are there because they help in survival. So for example, Mr. Mangan says that purring helps the kittens, who are blind, find their mother. Meaning that a random genetic mutation caused a single female cat to purr, and this trait helped its young find it better, and so more of them survived, and they produced more offspring than the cats that didn’t purr, and that trait became dominant in the species.

But anyone can see that there is vastly more going on in a cat’s purring than simply the function of being heard! The purring expresses the cat’s feelings, its consciousness, its very being as a cat. The Darwinian way of looking at things prevents us from seeing this wholeness, by reducing everything to a utilitarian explanation—a utility that not only fails to explain what is before us, in this case a cat’s purring, but denies what is most distinctive about it—the quality and expressiveness of the purring, which is not needed if its only function is to allow the blind kittens to locate their mother.

From the Darwinian point of view, purring doesn’t exist as an expression of the essence and personality of the cat, it came into being by an accident that was selected because it was useful. Thus Darwinism—like liberalism itself—empties the world of its actual experienced content and turns it into a desert.

Third LA comment:

Why do I say that if Darwinism were true, there could be no animal or human consciousness? Couldn’t consciousness come into being by a random mutation, and help its possessor have more offspring, and so be selected?

No. And here’s why. The thing that, according to Darwinism, helps the creature survive and have more offspring is either a change in its organic structure and functioning, or a change in its behavior. Darwinian advantageousness can only result from organic or behavioral changes in the creature, it cannot result from the creature’s consciousness.

To this, the Darwinists might reply: But couldn’t it be the case that consciousness came into being by a random genetic mutation, and then this consciousness led to a behavioral change which assisted in survivability, so that both the new faculty of consciousness and the behavioral change were selected ?

No. And here’s why. Before the new behavior, which in this scenario is an outgrowth of consciousness, can appear and be selected, the consciousness itself would have to appear and be selected. But consciousness that produces no outward behavioral change cannot be selected. Therefore the behavior that produces the actual advantage, if it were dependent on the prior appearance of consciousness, could never come into being. The behavior that produces a selective advantage could only come into being on its own, without any non-advantageous antecedent such as consciousness.

Only organic changes and behavioral changes can be selected. Consciousness cannot be selected, because, by itself, it doesn’t change anything. Therefore, if the world worked as the Darwinian theory of evolution says it does, consciousness could not have come into being. There would be no consciousness in the world, no sentient beings of any kind.

Fourth LA comment:

I’m not just saying that Darwinism fails to explain consciousness.

I’m saying that Darwinism positively precludes consciousness.

—end of initial entry—

LA writes:

The argument in comments 3 and 4 is admittedly tough sledding. I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who can point out how it doesn’t hold up.

Evariste writes:

Just a quick note—you never know what you’ll find on VFR! The topic matter may not be predictable, but the thinking and writing is consistently of a rare caliber.

Ben W. writes:

You talk about animals, consciousness and Darwinism. One thing that I find lacking in Darwinism is the component of persistence in consciousness. A random mutation may change an organ in a being. But how does that change persist in consciousness and memory? Our brain neurons convey information in an immediate way as electrical charges. What however enables the brain to retain patterns and recognize behaviors in a consistent way charge after electrical charge?

A pet dog comes to recognize its owner. How does a mutation persist a pattern in one’s consciousness? The immediate effect of a mutation has to translate into pattern recognition over time. I’ve never really seen a good Darwinian explanation for the persistence of patterns in memory and their use by consciousness over time. Instinct doesn’t really explain such development.

The French psychologist Jean Piaget had fascinating descriptions of the development of pattern recognition and consciousness in children. Especially how children develop appreciation of physical shapes and then go on to abstract thinking about forms. However Piaget thought that this attribute of pattern recognition and abstraction was an innate given of the human mind (almost Platonic in nature).

Ben W. writes:

Your argument that in Darwinism consciousness cannot precede organic change is the same argument against Marxism. In Marxist ideology material form precedes consciousness (body before spirit, matter before mind, economic property before intellectual resources). Both Darwinism and Marxism are 19th century intellectual constructs based on the primacy of the material. Engels in fact enthused over Darwin and recommended Darwin to Marx as the biological foundation for Marxism.

LA replies:

So, Darwin => Marx, Darwin => Hitler. All those great guys.

LA writes:

In reply to my comments, Rick Darby presents his thoughts on Darwinism, evolution, and consciousness, which are not unlike mine. Namely, consciousness is the driving force of evolution, not random changes in non-conscious matter.

Adela G. writes:

I had no idea that Austerism over the West [here] includes an almost mystical awareness of the consciousness of cats.

On a personal note, I am as conscious of my cats as they are of me; they would not have it otherwise. Far from being aloof, they gladly court me when I am thoughtlessly inattentive to them and greet me after even the briefest absence by swarming around and over me in a flurry of fur, treating me to kisses and love bites, abandoning all dignity in their efforts to secure my attention and affection.

My favorite expression of being conscious of cats’ consciousness is this poem.

Dale F. writes:

I don’t follow your logic in arguing the impossibility of consciousness having arisen through Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms. (This is not to argue the opposite; I share your doubts in Darwinism’s explanatory power.)

I think most people assume that consciousness, whatever it may be, confers enormous advantages. It allows us to be objective, freeing us from the tyranny of the immediate.

I also think most people assume that among non-human beings, predators and herd animals for instance both have some form of consciousness, no doubt more primitive than our own, but far above that of automata such as insects, and that that rudimentary consciousness is key to predators and herd animals being good at what they do.

We don’t really know what consciousness is, though we think we can identify its presence or absence. Thus it’s hard to say what constitutes the progression from something “pre-conscious” to “rudimentary consciousness.” But assuming for the sake of argument that we did know that progression, couldn’t it be true that the first random mutation in brain anatomy (for instance) that led to the crossing of that threshold would yield immediate behavioral changes, and hence reproductive advantages?

Again, this is not to argue that that is what happened, merely to question why, logically—if one is willing to allow the generally wild improbabilities at the heart of Darwinism—it couldn’t be the case that the arrival of rudimentary consciousness would have caused immediate behavioral changes, resulting in reproductive advantages.

LA replies:

Dale F. expresses his points extremely well and is raising exactly the right question, which I didn’t get to in my original post: Couldn’t it be the case that the brain mutation resulting in the first appearance of consciousness led immediately to the advantageous behavioral change, thus leading to the selection of both the brain mutation and the new behavior?

I have a half-formed answer to this, but will have to mull it over further, and also have some food and coffee, before replying.

Ben W. writes:

LA: “Dale F. expresses his points extremely well and is raising exactly the right question.”

Why is that? Dale is giving Darwinism the benefit of the doubt that something like that could have happened. Anything could happen but let Dale prove that it did happen. I can ask any question based on the supposition that anything can happen at anytime. How is that scientific?

Dale cannot even define what consciousness is and yet he is already asserting that something like that could happen. He starts off with an undefined term and then procedes to give a hypothesis a reality that has not been proven in two hundred years.

Why is Darwinism given the benefit of the doubt based on the possibility of something? In fact if Dale cannot prove the possibility of it occurring then how can he even surmise that it could possibly happen? I can surmise the impossibility of it happening just as well and argue for the impossibility. At this point his surmise is negated by my surmise and it all becomes a wash. The Darwinism becomes purely guesswork…

LA replies:

No. Dale is pursuing the same line I am: assuming Darwinism is true (which neither of us believes) how would this (the evolution of consciousnss) happen?

Remember, I don’t believe in Darwinism. But here I’m making the argument: if Darwinism were true, it could not produce consciousness.

In other words, I’m not just arguing the falsity of Darwinism or its inability to explain consciousness. I’m arguing that Darwinism positively precludes consciousness.

And Dale is replying by saying: if Darwinism were true, here is how it could produce consciousness.

Gintas writes:

I added my own comment over at Darby’s blog:

Killing’s Just So Stories includes a story about how the animals—but the cat not quite entirely—were domesticated (“The Cat That Walked By Himself”). It tells me more about the cat than Darwinian yarns do.

This is not an argument, but I find the Darwinian propositions to be utterly boring, perhaps in the same way an assembly-line worker might see yet another part go by. There is something to be said for a well-functioning assembly line, stamping out part after part—it makes the bean-counters happy, I suppose—but it really doesn’t thrill the soul or make for a humane world. But the idea of God inventing cats to interact with man is a fascinating meditation on God, cats, and man. That makes life spicy.

LA replies:

It’s false, and it represents a tremendous deadening. Take, as just one example, every discussion you’ve ever read by an anthropologist or evolutionist about human sex differences in behavior. Every account starts out the same way: “In hunter-gatherer tribes 50,000 years ago, men hunted together in groups and so developed [fill in the blank], while the women stayed back in the cave and developed [fill in the blank].” Everything that exists about the human male and female and their relations and respective behaviors is the result of some contingency in the hunter-gatherer stage of human pre-history. Everything you always wanted to know about the sexes is either fitted into that account, or else ignored. Yet the account, given by “scientists,” is 100 percent speculation, fiction-writing, story-telling. Meanwhile, the essence of man and woman, which we do observe every day of our lives and do know something about, is never considered, it can’t even be formulated. The idea that there may be something inherent about human maleness and femaleness is not even a dot on the horizon in contemporary thought.

And that way of thinking is ubiquitous and unchallenged, creating a reductive, distorted, de-humanizing—and boring—picture of all human things.

David K. writes (June 24):

It seems to me that Darwinian evolution does not preclude consciousness. This is because not all of the traits that actually arise as a result of a Darwinian evolutionary process need to be selected by that process. The process of selection involves a trait being propagated due to its adaptive power in its environment; the environment ‘selects’ the trait when the trait allows its bearer to pass the trait on more effectively within that environment. But evolutionary biologists think that some traits only arise because they are causally connected to traits that are selected for. The traits that are selected for (trait A) cause the unselected trait (B) so that whenever the enviroments selects trait A, trait B arises despite the fact that B confers no adaptive advantage.

Consciousness need not be one of the traits that is selected. Instead it might be something that arises for an organism when it reaches a certain level of physical complexity (ie. a certain level of neurological complexity). Raw physical brain complexity is what is selected for by evolution because that is what is allowing for the adaptive mechanical behavior (in a physicalist theory of behavior ) and thus is what is doing the adaptive labor. Consciousness might just be coming along for the ride. Consciousness would be an epiphenomenal trait that arises because of the development of a certain level of brain complexity; it would come about as a result of an evolutionary process but it is not selected by it because it is not, in itself, adaptive to the environment of its bearer. Rather, it is just somehow caused by a trait (brain complexity) that is adaptive to its enviroment. Under this view of consciousness as an epiphenomenal property that is caused by certain neurological developments that are themselves selected for by environmental factors, its arrival on the scene can’t be explained by natural selection (in that NS can’t explain consciousness’s existence in terms of consciousness’s adaptability to its environment, nor can it explain why there is a causal connection between the brain and consciousness in terms of adaptability… or any other anything else), but consciousness isn’t precluded by natural selection either.

However, I will be the first one to admit that while physical explanations of the world can be made consistent with the existence of things like consciousness, the explanations have to be altered in an implausible, unparsimonious and very ad-hoc way for this to happen.

LA replies:

I appreciate David K.’s frank admission that the explanation is implausible.

Erich writes:

David K. describes his discussion of natural selection and consciousness as “implausible, unparsimonious and…ad-hoc…” However, more pertinently, his attempt at an explanation of consciousness within the framework of natural selection is simply unscientific.

“Consciousness would be an epiphenomenal trait that arises because of the development of a certain level of brain complexity; it would come about as a result of an evolutionary process but it is not selected by it because it is not, in itself, adaptive to the environment of its bearer.”

His use of the word “epiphenomenon” is an obfuscatory way of saying “I don’t know how it got there”—just as, when your doctor tells you that some physical symptom you have is “idiopathic”, it’s really a hifalutin way of saying he doesn’t really know yet what is causing that symptom, nor even what that symptom is.

In keeping with this, for all his raveling of the nodus of the problem, David K. is really reduced to saying that consciousness “is just somehow caused by a trait (brain complexity) that is adaptive to its enviroment.”

Saying that a particular phenomenon is “just somehow caused by” X is not scientific at all: it is in fact semantic evidence of the absence of scientific method with regard to the precise thing (consciousness) about which scientific method is supposed to be explanatory. And finally, his pockets completely empty, David K. can only offer that epitaph of scientific (not to mention philosophical) bankruptcy:

“…but consciousness isn’t precluded by natural selection either.”

Julien B. writes:

Your original argument about consciousness begins with the claim that only behavior or organic structures can be selected, but can’t we simplify this futher? All that can be selected, ultimately, are the genetic traits that produce either behavior or structure (or whatever else interacts with the environment in selection). But in that case, why couldn’t consciousness have come about by being the effect of something genetic, and in turn producing behaviors that enhance the organism’s adaptiveness? If the behaviors are adaptive, they will be selected; but if the behaviors are adaptive _because_ they are based in conscious awareness, that means that conscious awareness will also be selected. Even so, what is being selected, ultimately, is the genetic trait that gives rise to consciousness (and so to consciously motivated behavior). So I don’t see why it’s more difficult to explain how consciousness is selected than it is to explain how behavior or organic structure is selected. Am I missing something?

LA replies:

I think someone else asked me a similar question in that same thread a few days ago and I intended to get back to him but did not.

A brief answer is that according to your model, each little “bit” of consciousness would need to appear (randomly), one bit at a time, and be selected one bit at a time. Each bit of consciousness would only appear and be selected in connection with the bit of behavior that it causes, one by one. This seems very unlikely. It seems more likely that the complex of consciousness, reasoning ability, and language is a single capacity which is applied to new and ever more demanding tasks.

I realize this is not an adequate answer, but it may contain the elements of one.

Julien B. writes:

So you’re saying that consciousness (and language and reason) couldn’t have evolved in the way I imagined because that would require that it first appeared in some much more primitive, incomplete state (a “bit”), which was then gradually built up into what we now have? That’s a very interesting and, I think, original objection. But as you say, it needs unpacking. Why couldn’t something like the following have happened? Once there were creatures with some very limited capacity of this kind, based on some genetic trait, and that capacity produced more adaptive behaviors; so it was selected. Over time, the existence of many creatures with this capacity created a new kind of (social) environment in which more complex behavior would have been advantageous. E.g., it became advantageous for these creatures to recognize the consciousness of others and adjust their behavior accordingly. Due to some further chance mutations that made this higher kind of consciousness possible, that greater capacity was then selected.

In this story, we do not have some initial “bit” of consciousness to which further “bits” are added. Rather, each case of the appearance of capacities of this kind involves a single capacity. Now it may be that this is extremely unlikely, but it does suggest that Darwinian evolution is consistent with the existence of consciousness. However, I don’t know whether I’ve described a real alternative to the kind of story that you think is not believable. Would you say that the different forms of consciousness I’ve imagined are “bits” of consciousness? If so, my story isn’t an answer to your argument. But on the other hand, it does seem as if there can be degrees of consciousness in the sense that I’m suggesting: cats are conscious, but not to the same extent as we are, at least with respect to many things. (Maybe we aren’t conscious to the same extent as they are with respect to others.)

On a different point, Erich’s criticism of David K’s post is unfair. Erich writes:

“his pockets completely empty, David K. can only offer that epitaph of scientific (not to mention philosophical) bankruptcy: ’ … but consciousness isn’t precluded by natural selection either.”“

Since what is being discussed in this thread is precisely the question of whether it is precluded by natural selection, it’s perfectly fair for David to argue for this claim. Erich is also missing the point when he says that David’s “use of the word “epiphenomenon” is an obfuscatory way of saying “I don’t know how it got there”.” The word has a perfectly clear meaning: an epiphenomenon is something that is caused by other things but has no causal power itself. So calling consciousness “epiphenomenal” (if Darwinism is true) actually serves to make clear the point David is making. There is no obfuscation. (Although I disagree that it would have to be epiphenomenal under Darwinism.) Finally, David is under no obligation to explain how consciousness came to exist, since he was only trying to show that it could have come to exist even if Darwinism were true. These criticisms are way off base.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 16, 2008 01:58 AM | Send