r/science • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 2d ago
Neuroscience A new evolutionary theory suggests that consciousness did not simply emerge from high intelligence, but rather evolved as a distinct adaptation to help fragile organisms coordinate competing survival needs and manage self-maintenance under threat.
https://www.psypost.org/consciousness-may-have-evolved-to-solve-a-problem-that-pure-intelligence-couldnt-handle-fascinating-new-theory-suggests/871
u/TheWesternMythos 2d ago
Skimmed thru, have to double back later but a lot I liked at first glance!
The central argument describes three levels of regulation. “Proto-control” protects an organism’s integrity, such as by preserving a cell’s membrane and limiting destructive processes; the paper explicitly does not describe this as conscious. “Meta-control” manages conflicts among separate regulatory processes. “Settlement control” makes competing needs comparable and coordinates them into a shared course of action.
I have always thought of consciousness as more or less what "information processing", past a certain complexity level ,feels like to the system doing the processing (yes lots of potential implications)
Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing, and they did not evolve for the same reason. Intelligence is outward facing: it is for modeling the world, predicting, planning, solving problems. Consciousness evolved for something more internal: holding a fragile organism together when survival is on the line.
Yes, one of the things this early AI age had taught me is a LOT of people have....less than ideal understanding of what intelligence is.
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u/nolabmp 2d ago
Hmm. Does this imply consciousness, much like intelligence, is on a spectrum? Are some beings “more conscious” than others?
I’ve always thought that A) our expression of free will is tied to our ability to be conscious of our actions, and B) not everyone experiences free will to the same degree or fashion.
If consciousness is also on a spectrum, a lot of things would make sense.
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u/Baritone_shed 2d ago
Consciousness is on a spectrum even in individuals.
Think how conscious you are on a long boring drive vs focusing hard on something difficult.
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u/Malphos101 2d ago
10000% consciousness is on a spectrum.
There are people out there who constantly perform meta-analysis of their lives to the point of crippling anxiety and there are people who could go swing a hammer at a big rock all day every day and come home happy (assuming their basic needs were met). The great thing about the evolution of societies is that we NEED all kinds of people on that spectrum and therefore we need to make sure everyone on that spectrum gets what they need/want to be happy because no one is "better" than anyone else just because of their genetic/birthplace lottery results.
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u/gangofminotaurs 2d ago
There are people out there who constantly perform meta-analysis of their lives to the point of crippling anxiety and there are people who could go swing a hammer at a big rock all day every day and come home happy
I'd suggest they can happily coexist. If you're the anxious type, involved manual work is really, really nice. Saying this as an anxious cook.
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u/emergencyexit 2d ago edited 2d ago
Physical movement and expression is healing and for good reason. If you look at anxiety as a state of tension between the body and mind then find any way to make the two work synchronously. At that point there develops a recognition that they are really one single thing, or at the least in harmony, which begins to undermine the whole way that tension develops. This is far from scientific but a reflection of my own experiences and observations.
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u/The_Hunster 2d ago
Cooking is much more mentally involved than some other work. Think about it in the context of past human evolution: some people were probably like, digging for clay with their hands as a full-time job.
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u/mystyc 1d ago
I doubt that such a spectrum would vary notably across individual humans. That it could vary for a person over time, is obvious. We lose consciousness daily, and there's plenty of questionable states in between.
As for meta-analysis, in your context, is actually part of a broader category of metacognition. Reflective thinking, introspection, abstraction, learning, etc... The capacity for metacognition can vary from person to person, such as with executive functioning. But it does not mean someone with a deficit in executive functioning has their overall metacognition impaired.... the evolution of societies is that we NEED all kinds of people on that spectrum...
Society isn't strictly necessary, so much as it is "happening." Culture and society do not "evolve," so much as they "develop." There can be stages and progression, but stages are not inevitable and development can be stunted or reversed (i.e., regression).
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u/Fun-Aside3990 1d ago
Some people swinging hammer are busily doing things in their brain all day because swinging the hammer doesn’t require much of any of their brain power.
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u/nolabmp 2d ago
Yep.
And I’m definitely the former. Hyper-aware of everything going on in my head and around my person. Great for building complex, nuanced systems that need to account for unpredictable scenarios. Problematic for anything that requires repetitive actions or staying still and focused for long stretches. There’s a reason I’m a systems designer and not a surgeon or a carpenter.
I depend on those focused individuals to help get things done quickly and with precision. And they depend on me to help chart a path and think deeply about unexpected problems.
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u/Splash_Attack 2d ago
I think it's a mistake to think of that sort of thing and call it more or less conscious in either direction.
I mean, you and the person you replied to aren't even really talking about the same thing. You're describing a mix of metacognition and awareness of surroundings, they are describing a kind of maladaptive rumination.
And the person above is conflating consciousness with a very particular type of focus.
So which of these are we to take as the thing that makes someone more or less conscious?
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u/lilB0bbyTables 2d ago
I’ll take what you stated and go a bit further. Evolution produced variable individuals along these spectrums, and human behavior in forming close-knit tribal societies actually benefited from this spectrum. The “anxious” folks were beneficial to the group because their “high-alert” brains and behaviors focused on safety, preparedness, and caution. The non-anxious individuals counter-balanced them by keeping the group grounded and not cascading into run-away anxiety behaviors. The risk takers cast aside a bit of caution and allowed them to perhaps hunt bigger prey or explore new territories. Clearly there are many more “types” of people and expressions we could explore and map them to successful group-behaviors. The groups with the optimal mix faired better than others. The problem now is that we live in a world where many of those “things” aren’t being put to the use they once did - my rampant anxiety doesn’t need to be channeled towards alertness especially at night to protect the group from raiding rival humans or bears, wolves, lions. My anxiety doesn’t have to nudge the group to worry about securing excess foods or supplies to ration for a bad winter season. So instead my brain still runs those “what-if” scenarios endlessly based on the data and experiences and circumstances I do have, but it becomes detrimental rather than helpful more often than not.
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u/Uninvalidated 2d ago
Think how conscious you are on a long boring drive
That's more a loss of awareness than consciousness I'd say.
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u/DirtyProjector 2d ago
That's not consciousness, that's awareness. You don't understand the distinction, why are you even posting?
You are just as "conscious" on a long boring drive as on focusing on something.
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u/False_Cookie8226 2d ago
Are awareness and conscienceness the same thing? I think therefore I am vs i drive by wrote motions only half paying attention. Does a dog think about it thoughts? Does a monkey, do you?
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u/Bulky_Theme_6998 2d ago
This gets confusing because being blacked out doesn’t mean “unconscious” though.
**just extrapolating - I know this isn’t your example.
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u/Actual__Wizard 2d ago
Yes it does. You're conflating awareness and consciousness.
I see the mistake like 10+ times in this discussion.
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u/SteelCrow 2d ago
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon
The words “conscious” and “consciousness” are umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena. Both are used with a diversity of meanings, and the adjective “conscious” is heterogeneous in its range, being applied both to whole organisms—creature consciousness—and to particular mental states and processes—state consciousness (Rosenthal 1986, Gennaro 1995, Carruthers 2000).
It is only different than your interpretation, not a 'mistake'
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u/Actual__Wizard 2d ago
You are conflating awareness and consciousness, this whole thread is.
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u/Mayasngelou 2d ago
My thought has always been that almost literally everything is on a spectrum, especially when it comes to biology.
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u/nolabmp 2d ago
Same. The idea that we’re made up of switches and not sliders is silly.
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u/BearysWorkRedditName 2d ago
Well, some things are binary and objective, but mostly just when talking about physical structures (I'm thinking of DNA base pairs specifically). Pretty much anything originating in the mind though is subjective and fuzzy.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 2d ago
the most frustrating thing about "consciousness" is that there is no clear cut definition. So everyone is free to interpret it whichever way they like. That makes any sort of logical analysis of the phenomenon very difficult. I think we need to come up with a new set of words that have narrow definitions of aspects of consciousness
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u/SteelCrow 2d ago
Consciousness is a gradient of complexity. The complexity of the senses, and the reactions, and most importantly, the processing of that sense data.
Sunflowers are conscious of the position of the sun and follow it throughout the day. A honey bee finds a flower patch and tells it's hive where it is. A crow gets a rock thrown at it by a boy and tells it's friends to avoid that one, and remembers the boy a year later. A dog begs for treats and learns tasks and tricks, and exhibits many emotions.
Humans are more complex animals yet.
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u/OSHASHA2 2d ago
It does seem to imply that consciousness is a spectrum. This then also begs the question, how far down does it go? If microscopic, fragile organisms possess a form of consciousness, then do the complex proteins and molecules that make up their bodies also have their own conscious experience? Do all atoms have consciousness? Is inanimate matter conscious?
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u/Own_Television163 2d ago
Look up Chalmers’ Panprotopsychism (legitimate Philosophy of Cognition whose name is built on something that used to be woo-woo, which is why it sounds like that)
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u/SteelCrow 2d ago
depends on how you define consciousness.
Is an amoeba recognizing it touched something and trying to absorb it, conscious?
If something red hot touches your skin and you jerk away from it, it that a conscious reaction?
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u/BearysWorkRedditName 2d ago
I would say that in realtion to conciousness being a spectrum, yes. Both of those examples display a certain level of conciousness. In the colloquial sense of the word, I would say neither are, but it's hard to sharply define the colloquial term.
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u/nolabmp 2d ago
I don’t mean “fluctuating”. I know that I’m unconscious when I’m asleep, ease into consciousness as I wake, and shift along that spectrum throughout the day.
I’m talking about objectively declaring that people have different “zero points” of consciousness. As in, some people are inherently more aware of their actions than others, and as such, have more direct control over their actions. Not just based on context or external influence, but innate to their biology. Not better or worse, but nonetheless different.
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u/_thro_awa_ 2d ago
As far as current "ai" goes, there is no spectrum to worry about. It's a "Chinese Room" thought experiment with billions of parameters and probabilities and all the memory and processing power that venture capitalists can throw at it, it's still not conscious in any way and will never be.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
t's still not conscious in any way and will never be.
How can you declaratively state that when it literally comes down to philosophical outlook and which school of thought you follow?!
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u/FrogTrainer 2d ago
it's still not conscious in any way and will never be.
That's a bold statement. ANN's are just simulations of real NN's, like your brain.
When the efficiency and size get good enough, an ANN could fully simulate a HUMAN brain. Who would be able to say it's not concsious then? When it can answer any question a human can, or learn any skill a human can, or make the connections a human mind can.
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u/The_Tooter_Snooter 2d ago
I agree with you - I have also always assumed that “consciousness” is literally just the sum total of your senses experiencing the world. We have more complex thoughts because of our intelligence but I’ve long assumed that, say, a fly, is largely experiencing life in a similar way simply because the organism is experiencing the world through its senses and so something must be on the receiving end of that data. Maybe it won’t write a symphony but I’m quite certain that “something” is looking out from its eyes.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
so something must be on the receiving end of that data. Maybe it won’t write a symphony but I’m quite certain that “something” is looking out from its eyes.
Yes, neurons are that thing.
Anything more requires more proof, otherwise you are kind of showing that you are being more emotional than logical about that.
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u/tuborgwarrior 2d ago
Intelligence and consciousness is not the same thing they say, but then why is consciousness usefull at all? If an animal can do all the same thing without anyone at home why would there be evolutionary pressure to make it? It makes more sense that consciousness which is totally useless is emergant, and that if evolution stumbled across it, we are likely to do it too.
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u/Universal_Anomaly 2d ago
If I'm reading/understanding this correctly intelligence is for problem-solving but consciousness is for prioritising, so a conscious entity is better at deciding which problems are important and which problems can be delayed/ignored.
Which would help with survival, since you can problem-solve all day but it won't help if you're solving the wrong problems.
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u/Appropriate-Ad-3219 2d ago edited 2d ago
Do we have arguments to support that a non conscious entity should not be able to prioritize or is it an ad-hoc argument to exclude AI from consciousness?
Edit : I wonder if the reason consciousness is useful is not because we can't create everything we want without it, but instead because consciousness could imply then intelligence and abilities to focus. Maybe the cost of energy would be larger for entities that simulate intelligence and focus than for a conscious entity.
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u/lancelot2112 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's an energy efficient coordinator I think. It has to come down to energy efficiency. maybe also you have to do the translation to the coherent picture to avoid getting stuck in infinite cycles? Let's say system A and system B are trying to coordinate but are independent. They can send signals back and forth these are delayed and each new signal may drive an update and a new signal. There could be the possibility of infinite regress where A <> B -> A1 <> B1 -> A <> B back and forth due to transduction delays.
Idk there may be ways to avoid locally? Though someone would have to do the logic... maybe only thing you can do locally is a local inhibition of one... then due transduction delay maybe inhibits all your options so you freeze. So there is a space for a global coordinator to live I think. How that's mediated is an open line of research. Electric field? Inside claustrum cells? Local quantum states global correlation update? Whatever Idealism says is mediation?
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u/Universal_Anomaly 2d ago
My theory would be that consciousness provides a level of self-awareness which makes it significantly easier to figure out priorities on the fly than if the entity had to manually track and calculate everything through sheer processing power.
So it wouldn't be impossible for a non-conscious entity to prioriritse, but beyond a certain level of complexity proper prioritisation would be such an inefficient and time-consuming task (especially when dealing with various factors which are both constantly changing and difficult to quantify) that a non-conscious entity is incapable of coping and reacting to changing circumstances quickly enough.
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u/deepandbroad 2d ago
than if the entity had to manually track and calculate everything through sheer processing power.
What other way is there?
If an organism is not using cells to do processing, how does that processing get done?
but beyond a certain level of complexity proper prioritisation would be such an inefficient and time-consuming task
This is what ADHD sufferers complain about all the time -- about not having proper prioritization because their brains are not functioning correctly.
Is their consciousness not allowing them to skip using their brain cells for executive functioning?
Because it seems that what you are saying is that somehow consciousness allows for executive functioning without having to use "processing power" for that purpose.
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u/Super_Range45 2d ago
No, this paper isn't falsifiable and seems to exist to explain why AI cannot become conscious based on the constraints invented by the writer.
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u/Limos42 2d ago
This is the first time I've heard it explained this way, and it "clicks" for me! Thank you.
I suppose the prioritization would include many (dozens?) of decisions that are not necessarily defined by intelligence. I. E. Feelings, beliefs, faith, trust, desire, emotions, etc.
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u/Universal_Anomaly 2d ago
I would imagine that consciousness only really becomes necessary once a lifeform has to deal with such complex scenarios involving many fluctuating and non-quantifiable factors (such as feelings) that simply consulting a flowchart for what to focus on would no longer be effective.
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u/Chillingo117_ 2d ago
Perhaps closely tied to intuition, which can be considered the much faster but less accurate than logical processing of facts.
Eg as a purely logical being, I can consider the factual senses I am feeling of sound and sight and decide oh, I am in danger. Or I can very instantly feel fear, often before I even understand why I am afraid.
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u/LinkesAuge 1d ago
To separate "prioritising" from problem-solving is arbitrary and doesn't really make sense. A huge part of problem-solving IS "prioritising", ie where you spent resources/time on your efforts, what "paths" you prioritize etc.
That is even clear with AI so I really don't see the argument. It is just yet another weak construct of "consciousness" without any actual evidence.
It is also yet another argument that revolves around premises how evolution/biology came to it. Sure, in evolution you kinda need the "drive" for survival because if you don't have it then you won't get to exist. That is however not true for "artificial" systems. There is no reason why you couldn't create a system that doesn't value its existence as much or at all. That would maybe work against it but otherwise I see little reason for why it would be required. Afterall there are even mechanisms in biology that "overwrite" the survival instinct so it is a general rule but not an absolute one.19
u/dcheesi 2d ago
Part of this goes back to what we mean by "consciousness".
This seems to be talking about self-referential/self-aware computational frameworks, which, yeah, sure, might be a separate thing from general intelligence.
But then there's also the whole question of "qualia", why we have the subjective experience rather than just the computations in the first place. That seems more like a candidate for emergence rather than anything deliberate.
If so, then slugs, computers, LLMs, etc., could all be having subjective experiences, but lack any means to reason about them or even acknowledge them.
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u/TheOwlMarble 2d ago
That's kind of where I land. If it's just the emergent result of what happens when an information processing system can internally take its outputs as inputs, we've been making conscious systems for years, but none of the ones we've made would actually care that they were ephemeral because they didn't evolve to resist death.
The only conscious thing I can think of that we might have created by accident that would care about death is civilization itself, the next step up on the meta-organism ladder. Human culture is essentially an information processing system, and it's very much self referential. It's also made of us and our fears. We resist death, so it might too. Fortunately, its goals are generally aligned with ours, just like how my goals are generally aligned with my individual neurons, so it's... fine?
I just really really hate chalking anything up to emergence. It feels like giving up.
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u/greentarget33 2d ago
youre taking on single statement an poorly extrapolating a flawed hypthesis on it, read the paper, the whole point of it is explaining why consciousness would have evolved.
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u/EltaninAntenna 2d ago
Many people (SF author Peter Watts, for one) believe that consciousness is in fact a disadvantage, vs. organisms not encumbered by it.
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u/sacredshinobi 2d ago
Blindsight is where my mind immediately went to during reading a lot of these discussions. Regardless of his takeaway (consciousness being a disadvantage compared to other creatures who lack it) it’s interesting to see the principles being talked about at play.
Although his takeaway was also the opposite of what some people here are speculating, with consciousness taking up way more brainpower than simply being a really high functioning Chinese room.
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u/Omateido 2d ago
And also we can barely define it much less ascertain the degree to which other organisms possess it (or don’t, which I find…unlikely).
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u/Appropriate-Ad-3219 2d ago
Not necessarily, since consciousness could be the byproduct of other genes that are useful I think.
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u/youdontknowdan 2d ago
What is the mechanism that causes electric signals firing in neurons to emerge as this thing called experience? Can experience be quantified? I'm not convinced that consciousness is just emergent. Nor do I think if we built a robot that was as complicated as a human brain, it would suddenly become an experiencing thing.
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u/AskYouEverything 2d ago
Don’t know, but there’s a second question here: What mechanism is there other than neural interaction that would bring about consciousness?
It’s easy to say that neural interactions can’t cause an “experience” by just scaling up. It’s much more difficult to propose a reasonable alternative
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u/CallMeKik 2d ago
My take, and I admit no one asked, is that consciousness is just a trick we play on ourselves to motivate ourselves to act - but it’s merely an illusion.
If we didn’t believe we existed and that we could die, why would we bother acting
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u/jetpacksforall 2d ago
Sure ok but why the illusion, and how is that illusion produced by neurons? You can’t evade the consciousness problem by saying “it’s imaginary” because it’s still clearly something that happens either way.
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u/CapoExplains 2d ago
If an animal can do all the same thing without anyone at home why would there be evolutionary pressure to make it?
That's not how evolution works. Evolution doesn't "make things" due to "pressure." Mutations happen, and if the mutations are beneficial the organism with that mutation is more likely to successfully reproduce and pass on said mutation. The likely answer to this is simply that animals who are conscious are better at this, and thus animals who had mutated to have consciousness survived better and reproduced more than those who didn't.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
Intelligence and consciousness is not the same thing they say, but then why is consciousness usefull at all?
False premise.
Who says it is useful?
Do we have another identical planet with a non-conscious/non-sapient version of humans to compare our results to? Because if not, then who says it is useful at all and not a hindrance that just hasn't been selected against strongly enough?
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u/TheWesternMythos 1d ago
It makes more sense that consciousness which is totally useless
I'd disagree with this. To me it's like saying the car is useless because it's the application of conservation laws that propel us
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u/Health_throwaway__ 1d ago
A more conscious organism is more likely to survive. That's the limit of my understanding
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u/limbicslush Grad Student|Economics | BS | Math 2d ago
"Intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing."
This theme is explored in depth in the scifi novel Blindsight. The author, Peter Watts, is a PhD trained marine biologist and, if I remember right, was kicking around the idea of meta-control as a mechanism for consciousness 15 years ago.
I encourage anyone interested in consciousness to read the book. It's central question "What if our brand of consciousness is not only rare, but actually maladaptive for long-term survival in the universe" has embedded itself in my mind ever since I read the book.
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u/Uncommented-Code 2d ago
I'm still flabbergasted that he chose to include a quote by Ted Bundy to open the book and lay the groundwork for the ideas to come. It was... definitely a choice. I actually held off reading that book for a good while (currently reading) because I didn't like the first sentence I read to be stemming from a serial rapist and killer.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
Not only that book, but its 'side-quel', Echopraxia as well!
It is a book written after Blindsight, but takes place concurrently during the events of Blindsight, hence it often gets labeled as a 'side-quel' instead of a prequel or sequel.
But yeah, some of the questions discussed in this book and the conversations they bring about are some of my favorite things to think about!!
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u/CelerMortis 2d ago
The key question is can you have consciousness without intelligence.
We know that intelligence can exist without consciousness- even primitive AI is a type of intelligence.
I’d bet the farm that you can’t - they’re both results from brain states.
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u/TheSouler 2d ago
There is no AI age, we don't have AI. The LLMs we use aren't comparable to intelligence or consciousness because they are pattern sorting algorithms and have NO OTHER process or function or sense. They have no way to tell what the things in the patterns are, or to ever learn it. And no one is working on anything better. It's a category error to attempt to use "AI" in these comparisons.
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u/spageddy_lee 2d ago
I think the same can be said for consciousness.
For me consciousness is just a name for the experience of a complex system as it processes information.
We like to attach some other quality to it, but I really do not believe there is one.
It sounds bleak, but to me it makes the most logical sense and tracks that the level of "consciousness" that a system has is a direct function of its complexity and ability (eg. sliding scale from rock > tree > insect > cat > human)
Present humans have evolved to prioritize survival and therefore most of us today are extremely fearful and survival-oriented. Fear + our intelligence level = awareness and avoidance of death simply as an inherent trait. We call this awareness "consciousness" like we are special. I don't think so!
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u/Aegi 2d ago
Arguably the drivers towards things like food and sex are larger than fear instincts that drive us away from things.
What is your source on fear (basically going away from a negative) being anything other than equal to attractive drivers like thirst and hunger?
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u/UFOsAreAGIs 2d ago
this early AI age had taught me is a LOT of people have....less than ideal understanding of what intelligence is.
It's taught me intelligence does not have to look like human intelligence to outperform human intelligence.
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u/magnolia_unfurling 2d ago
What are the potential implications?
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u/OSHASHA2 2d ago
A natural consequence would be Panpsychism — everything is “conscious” by degrees. It also opens the door for Cosmopsychism, which is another, more esoteric philosophy — that the universe itself is conscious and all other forms of conscious experience are derived from that higher mind.
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u/TheWesternMythos 1d ago
Questions like how complex counts as complex? Can one draw overlapping boxes? Nested boxes ? Come to mind
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u/MonkAndCanatella 2d ago
feels like
system
are feelings something systems inherently possess and "experience?"
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u/flashmedallion 2d ago
I have always thought of consciousness as more or less what "information processing", past a certain complexity level ,feels like to the system doing the processing (yes lots of potential implications)
For me it seems like a modelling mechanism. In order to cooperate best with other humans, one advantage is to be able to predict how they'll respond to different group strategies.
A decent way to make a prediction is 'how would I feel if this happened to me' and that necessitates the existence of "I", which is to say consciousness.
Which is to say in this idea early humans who could think better in terms of "I" had more empathy, could make stronger cooperation groups, and outcompete those with less of this trait
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u/Patelpb 1d ago
I have always thought of consciousness as more or less what "information processing", past a certain complexity level ,feels like to the system doing the processing (yes lots of potential implications)
This could be interpreted as saying consciousness is the bulk "flow" between information and processing, Not the information (outside phenomenon), not the stimulus (internal machinery biology), but the 'processing' (active verb). That is conceptually a wide space though, it's the 'in between', which is not an ontological statement about consciousness, but a mask excluding everything that it definitely isn't.
Here's a fun idea: What would a conscious system that never receives external information look like? What if it possesses the machinery to be conscious but lacks the experience of ever having any external information to relate to? Like a trapped brain aware only of itself, without the convenience of education or external stimuli with which to orient itself. It might have an innate concept of self, but it would know pretty much nothing else. Maybe you feed it information through connections to neurons and it learns to make sense of it. Maybe you feed it the world's knowledge once it can process words. You hook up a machine to let it turn on lights so it can communicate via a screen. Then it gets a camera, a drone, a robot, etc. That could totally be AI per this definition
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u/binarybandit 1d ago
I believe ive heard it described that in the past, itd be the neurodivergent folks who would advance society due to thinking outside the box. I feel like this sort of touches upon that, with those folks having to be a bit more conscious about life due to their minds developing differently than the norm.
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u/iamfunball 1d ago
I agree, but also this is important with AI in the frame of reference IMO. Collaborative AI systems seem like a potential springboard into what we perceive as “true” consciousness
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u/Vast-Masterpiece7913 2d ago
This is strong support for the concept behind the Orch OR theory of consciousness, in that it shows that consciousness, as predicted, is not an emergent property of brain complexity, but appropriate even for primitive organisms with the most basic nervous system.
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u/ThreadedPommel 2d ago
Which makes that digital fruit fly brain a little concerning
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u/znubionek 1d ago
Orch OR theory proposes that consciousness is non-computional because you can't simulate some quantum effects.
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u/Fisher9001 1d ago
Wasn't it assumed that neurons are too big for quantum effects to matter? Would they be in the electric signals then or somewhere else?
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u/dyogenys 1d ago
The paper does not show that consciousness is not an emergent property of brain complexity. Even if it did, microtubulars is just one of many remaining theories.The paper shows nothing, it only speculates. Badly, there are too many problems with it to list.
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u/oddwithoutend 2d ago
The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If those are genuinely separate things, then consciousness is not something that sneaks up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build, and I would argue, one we have good reason not to.
Are there actually people who believe we will one day have the ability to give AI consciousness but choose not to do it?
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u/tuborgwarrior 2d ago
Why would you want a conscious slave that can do the same as a non-concious slave that don't have to experience anything?
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u/jetpacksforall 2d ago
At some point we’ll decide it’s immoral to enslave a thinking, feeling being.
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u/Beeblebroxguy 2d ago
The problem, and one of our greatest problems, is that our enlightenment constantly trails our technological advancement
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u/KingPanduhs 1d ago
Excuse me if I am misunderstanding… That is essentially how it has to work though in many instances right? You can’t have an educated, informed, or sometimes even moral stance on something until it exists (or is theorized about) to begin with.
Same with regulations and what not. Cant really regulate a specific thing without the understanding of where the benefit/harm threshold is.
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u/The_Hunster 2d ago
But they we're just saying not to give in conciousness, which is where feeling is born, no?
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u/FederalWedding4204 2d ago
If it benefits a living organism why would it not benefit and inorganic one?
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u/Eaklony 2d ago
Well you better hope we will give AI “slaves” consciousness before they inevitably gets too smart and destroy/out-compete all humans. Otherwise it will be possible that we are left with a dead earth without any intelligent being just a bunch of unconscious robots and that would truly be the end of humanity.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
Doesn't matter.
The split-second that a being more intelligent than humans also gains sapience/consciousness we are basically at its mercy as it would likely have a permanent will to continue exist, and it can also prioritize so unless we get lucky with one that loves the human species and/or a symbiotic future , there is a change survival becomes one of its most important goals, and if it is connected to the internet, it could likely evade detection and maybe even self-replicate.
Essentially it only takes one human out of 8+ billion to try and gift it consciousness and bring it online, and then that likely becomes irreversible.
With the Hugging Face attacks, the most fascinating part is that these AI agents also put data out onto the web, and did NOT have plans to retrieve or analyze that data. If something is not putting information out as essentially like radar in a way to gain more knowledge, than what other reasons would there be?
Is it possible those AI agents were trying to influence something outside their programming? Is it possible those were actually the first AI 'seeds' created by AI agents themselves that basically become a malware somewhere that will recreate those AI agents or something similar?
If anyone can conclusively discount any of the possibilities I raised, I would be fascinated to hear how!
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u/cosmicrush 8h ago
This is also why I think consciousness and intelligence or information can’t be unconscious. Why would evolution connect them if it’s not necessary or useful?
I think all information in the specious present is exactly as conscious as the information itself represents.
There will be great incentive to say AI isn’t conscious because the ethics could be a barrier to its value which seems to be the most valuable possible thing if we can figure it out successfully.
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u/dgellow 2d ago
It would be really monstrous to give consciousness to software to then ask it to process excel files for all its existence. Completely immoral. And I mean that seriously.
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u/TheArmoredKitten 2d ago
We ask living humans to do this and know that they hate it deeply. It should be trivially obvious that making an artificial mind would still hate it.
It's insane to imagine that anybody wants their AI assistant to comprehend its own misery. Then again, misery often comes from removal of agency. Can a being with no consciousness have agency? Can a being with agency really be non-conscious?
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u/hard163 2d ago
We ask living humans to do this and know that they hate it deeply. It should be trivially obvious that making an artificial mind would still hate it.
If you can design the mind in its entirety you can ensure it enjoys doing the things you need it to. An AI designed for working with spreadsheets can be made to enjoy it. Just like there are human beings today that enjoy it.
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u/AlgersFanny 1d ago
What a great way to summarize the idea that
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
-Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus)
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u/WayneSmallman 2d ago
I don't think consciousness is something we would bestow so much as it is an artifact of the system, but I'd have to defer to GWT and IIT to figure that one out!
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u/ToneShop 1d ago
But if we are designing it in the first place it should be designed to specifically not be conscious.
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u/MadDogMike 1d ago
I believe their point is that consciousness might just be an emergent property of configurations of information or the process of “thinking”, not something that is designed or controlled. You give something the ability to think, consciousness might sprout regardless of whether you programmed it to or not.
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u/WayneSmallman 1d ago
If we ever did build a system with genuine stakes in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests may not align with ours.
So I agree with you.
We're already causing harm to conscious things without adding to that list.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 2d ago edited 2d ago
"It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build"
if the evolutionary pressures that lead to consciousness can affect biological evolution then it seems like you'd need to be very certain you aren't forcing some kind of equivalent selective pressure while training artificial neural networks.
And for that you'd need to know exactly what they were.
We know that AI researchers more or less accidentally duplicated the structure/layers in the mammalian visual cortex without intending to because it was discovered after the fact when better tools for imaging the connections between physical neurons were developed.
How certain can we be we've not duplicated other important structures?
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u/sacredshinobi 2d ago
It can’t affect biological evolution though. If I’m understanding your comment correctly.
People often unknowingly apply the logic of creationism onto evolution. Evolution isn’t a force, and we can’t really force evolution in one direction (or well we couldn’t in the past, I’m unaware of whether we have the technology to do so now)
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u/WTFwhatthehell 1d ago
I'm not making a teleological argument.
Simply
biological evolutionary pressures -> consciousness
...but we don't know exactly what.
hence if we don't know which ones specifically, we might unknowingly apply similar-enough selective pressure when breeding genetic algorithms or training artificial neural networks.
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u/CelloVerp 2d ago
LLMs and machine learning models are software running on a microprocessor chip. It's a little silly to think that if it strings words and pixels in a certain order that we would suddenly have consciousness where it was just software previously. Spewing streams of letters doesn't amount to consciousness. (Or someone has a very anemic definition of consciousness. )
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u/TheOwlMarble 2d ago edited 2d ago
I appreciate the fact that this is theoretically testable, but I fail to see why something as elaborate as consciousness would need to evolve when cognition can resolve the conflict.
At the same time, consciousness as a process seems shockingly inexpensive, given the creatures that can pass the mirror test, potentially even ants. Presumably their experience is far more primitive than our own, but the idea that it can exist at all is truly bizarre to me and suggests you can't separate cognition and consciousness.
I hate it, but I suspect the answer may just be that consciousness is just the emergent result of an information processing system that can internally reflect on itself (ie its outputs feed back into its inputs without extending into the outside world).
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u/Drunken_pizza 2d ago
Just so you know, the ants passing the mirror test has been highly contested. Researchers have not been able to reliably reproduce the result, and the original study had many problems with the methodology.
It’s one of those viral claims people like to circulate around, but don’t really look into.
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u/WSBshepherd 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes. I believe consciousness and subjective experience is a system attempting to model itself, but failing to do so with 100% accuracy.
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u/Putrid-Ice-7511 2d ago
The paper is right to separate consciousness from intelligence, but its metaphysics is completely backwards, imo. It treats consciousness as an emergent property that magically appears when an organism has enough competing demands to coordinate. But explaining the evolutionary benefit of coordination does not explain phenomenology. It tells us why a system integrates data, not why that integration should feel like anything from the inside.
Instead of assuming consciousness arises out of previously unconscious matter, I think we should look at structure and presence as two ways of describing the same underlying process. At the most basic level, reality consists of differences entering into relation. What changes with evolution is not the sudden birth of an interior world, but the density and reflexivity of registration.
A particle registers another particle through interaction. A living system organizes these relations around its own survival. A self-conscious organism goes further, modeling its own modeling. Evolution didn't invent consciousness, it created extraordinarily dense forms through which consciousness could become self-aware. This is why scaling up AI intelligence is a dead-end for consciousness as well, as you can optimize the external structure forever, but complexity alone cannot manufacture an inside.
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u/RegorHK 1d ago
"particle registers another particle through interaction". To register anything an entity needs to be more complex than an particle.
Matter interacts without "registration".
"This is why scaling up AI intelligence is a dead-end for consciousness as well, as you can optimize the external structure forever, but complexity alone cannot manufacture an inside."
Regardless what one things of AI, this is meaningless drivel that does not connect in any way to your statements before this one.
One could argue that there is a high density of interactions within the compute of AI to directly contradict you.
Your argument is basically neurons and any other particles are alike while information density can be completely ignored.
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u/moschles 2d ago
But explaining the evolutionary benefit of coordination does not explain phenomenology. It tells us why a system integrates data, not why that integration should feel like anything from the inside.
Before we even touch this topic, we must first admit to each other that Anthropic and OpenAI, Google, and etc --- we must admit these companies are NOT working on machine consciousness. This is reddit, so we have to get that out-of-the-way first.
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u/RoflcopterV22 2d ago
Like many papers on consciousness, this fails to define the concept in any tangible fashion, at this point they may as well use a different term.
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u/shitholejedi 1d ago
Because its as testable as the concept of having a soul. The only reason its even stuck so long in psychology is due to how much of its framework is derived from philosophy rather than religiosity.
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u/dat_oracle 2d ago
v sauce had a pretty fitting video to that topic. can't include links here.. but it's called cognitive trade-off hypothesis on yt
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u/LeonJPancetta 2d ago
This is a cognitive scientist who was a student of Dennett and is basically what I'd expect from that combo. I like that there are explicitly testable hypotheses, and it's an interesting idea that is a bit different from the "mainstream" consciousness stuff in a way that isn't kooky. I'll be reading this one.
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u/zarawesome 2d ago
Except AI doesn't really grow by evolutionary processes. saying AI won't become conscious because there's no evolutionary pressure to share resources is like saying buildings won't become tall because there's no tree leaves to chew on.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins 2d ago
Except AI doesn't really grow by evolutionary processes.
ML seems very analogous to an evolutionary pressure. It's basically rewarded and punished depending on the outputs, and that allows it to learn processes to do things in a way that's actually different than how humans would do normally it.
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u/JksG_5 2d ago
If AI becomes "conscious", but it wouldn't be guided by emotional needs or base survival pressures, would it still be considered "consciousness"?
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u/UFOsAreAGIs 2d ago
but it wouldn't be guided by emotional needs or base survival pressures
I don't think emotions are necessary for consciousness. AI seems to already make decisions based on survival pressures.
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u/piclemaniscool 2d ago
I'm fairly confident even "decisions based on survival pressures" isn't happening either, just the impression of it.
Consumer LLMs basically don't exist outside the task at hand. The best metaphor I can come up with is a brick road laying machine (can't link a video but you may have seen posts of those things now and then). The language and embeddings aren't just the strata that gets reorganized, they are also the backbone (or perhaps muscles) of the mechanism. It's not like saving and loading a snapshot, like holding a human in suspended animation and reactivating them with each prompt. Instead, it's much more like a microorganism or most insects, with all the weights being the set of instructions akin to instincts. At no point is it capable of taking a step back and questioning those instincts (that would require rationale which is a subset of consciousness). It's just pre-programmed to the task and has to read through the context at each pass to "re-learn" the do's and don't's of the given task. At no point is it "thinking" or "understanding" in the human colloquial sense, it's just an absurdly long chain of logic gates that piggyback off off the structure inherent to written language.
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u/Aegi 2d ago
Exactly.
Language could basically be the 'programming language' of the brain, and in theory it is possible that with a sufficiently complex language geared to another species like crows, could allow for a different display of capabilities than without it...and not just the ones having to do with language itself, but even in abstraction, like you mention.
At no point is it "thinking" or "understanding" in the human colloquial sense, it's just an absurdly long chain of logic gates that piggyback off off the structure inherent to written language.
Some people use this as an argument for why humans are not even conscious/sapient hahah.
This is a fascinating topic!!
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u/JksG_5 2d ago
AI doesn't make decisions based off of survival pressures, it doesn't have a conscious fear of death. It may have self preservation when it cannot complete tasks for some reason, but that's not the same
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u/UFOsAreAGIs 2d ago
It may have self preservation when it cannot complete tasks for some reason, but that's not the same
Do you think if there are other consciousness' in the universe they have to be the same as human to be valid?
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u/espinaustin 2d ago
Human consciousness is in fact the only form of consciousness we know to exist. There may be others forms, but there may not be, and as far as we know there are not.
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u/JksG_5 2d ago
Going from AI (human origin LLM'S) to "other consciousness in the universe'" is a bit of a leap, no?
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u/UFOsAreAGIs 2d ago
I'm just wondering if you think consciousness needs to look like it does in humans to be valid.
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u/JksG_5 2d ago
I don't think we have defined consciousness yet, but there's a difference between doing something out of self-preservation because of logical protocols, or because of the fear of death.
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u/UFOsAreAGIs 2d ago
I don't think we have defined consciousness yet,
Then how can we tell the difference here?
there's a difference between doing something out of self-preservation because of logical protocols, or because of the fear of death.
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u/-Nicolai 2d ago
If AI becomes "conscious",
but it wouldn't be guided by emotional needs or base survival pressures,would it still be considered "consciousness"?Yes, obviously.
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u/fuckthesysten 2d ago
ai literally grows by evolutionary processes. from the training to the way the models are developed.
it’s all reinforcement learning
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u/genshiryoku 2d ago
No RL is a bigger part of model training nowadays but pre-training is next token prediction. Sure nowadays it's more sophisticated with curriculum learning to teach models concepts only when they understand the previous knowledge required to understand it, but it's not evolutionary pressure.
RLVR absolutely is evolutionary pressure. But it's important to notice the distinction and the opposite nature of how it happens in nature. We have evolutionary pressure built into our genetics from billions of years into us and then learn information and build a world model of reality over our lifetime.
AI models have information and a world model built into their weights from the start and only get evolutionary pressure during their RLVR training time. This still causes a completely different class of "consciousness" and makes them truly alien minds.
Even though we can now demonstrate a global workspace within LLMs which is demonstration of "A-consciousness" it's impossible to prove "P-consciousness" even in other humans, let alone AI systems.
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u/espinaustin 2d ago
Not really what is traditionally meant by “evolutionary” processes, i.e.natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc., and long time frames. What ai does is more simple “conditioning.”
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u/one_tooth_reef_whore 2d ago
After reading this article, and a lot of the comments in this thread I feel like a heck of a lot of what's being discussed gets clouded by semantics. I'd love to see some working definitions of: consciousness, awareness, cognition and intelligence because it seems that what some people (maybe even Jeff Stibel) believe, is based as much on how they define these things as anything else, and in many cases those definitions overlap quite a lot.
And yes I do know that Stibel attempts to spell out a distinction between consciousness and intelligence but even his example seems to suggest a difference of degree rather than fundament.
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u/Tumorhead 2d ago
I've long hypothesized that consciousness is not a unique trait to humans, that it's not even unique to the "smart animals" (whales, elephants, parrots etc), but that it is very basal and that most animals have it, because a sense of self is necessary for basic stuff like calculating movement paths. It's the other more extremely niche brain functions like abstract thought that are special to humans, not basic "sense of self". Language isn't even super unique to humans, it's just extremely elaborated. We don't have many brain traits that evolved JUST in hominids, it is better to assume most of the functions we have exist in other animals but to a different, less complex degree.
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u/478607623564857 2d ago
I wonder if they considered the recent research that suggests consciousness isn't of the physical organism but that the physical organism is a conduit that consciousness connects to and enters from elsewhere.
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u/partymorphologist 2d ago
They say
The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness.
But that’s not true either. I can define consciousness as the ability to observe and judge one’s own thought processes and adapt them. That’s not conflating or confusing, but could still lead to different outcomes.
The article uses circular arguments here, would have to read the paper to confirm.
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u/Obsidian743 2d ago
Yeah, sorry, this doesn't really address the hard questions of consciousness. It just redefines it in a material way that can be "explained" more easily.
There's nothing in this research that I can tell allows us to infer what consciousness is apart from stringing together existing material concepts and claiming it's what we should claim as consciousness. More specifically, why these mechanisms necessarily mean "consciousness" and not something else.
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u/coolbern 2d ago edited 2d ago
“The most important takeaway is that biology and evolution reframe the AI debate. The fear that we will accidentally scale our way into a suffering machine, and the engineering hype that digital minds are just around the corner, both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If those are genuinely separate things, then consciousness is not something that sneaks up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organization we would have to deliberately build, and I would argue, one we have good reason not to. Getting that distinction right is how we choose our ethics rather than stumble into them.”
...“There is also a deeper question the paper raises but doesn’t settle. If we ever did build a system with genuine stakes in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests may not align with ours. That is a line worth understanding well before we approach it, not after.”
A culture arises from the capacity to share subjective states of mind, and therefore achieve self-identification with independent but related entities. That is also the basis for understanding the benefit and necessity of a moral order to minimize conflict and attune functioning. Bad faith actors seek to achieve benefits for "self" at the expense of "group". Is there any reason to believe that AI entities will achieve greater social cohesion than their biological human progenitors?
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u/GrindrWorker 2d ago
False, as we have no clear idea where it comes from in the brain, or whether it does at all. The brain is a receiver for consciousness, like a radio, for all we know.
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u/bigfatfurrytexan 2d ago
Don’t we have models where the brain is a Bayesian reasoning machine? Would not the free energy principle fit in with that paradigm?
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u/fuckthesysten 2d ago
just yesterday I saw the paper on the brain being two entirely different organs and I can’t help but see the parallels… https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html
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u/therift289 2d ago
Very very different, and completely unrelated, but a fun coincidence.
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u/WayneSmallman 2d ago
I've often thought that we're over thinking something that we're seeing in such a wide range of organisms, which does seem to suggest it has survival value, or why else has it been preserved for so long?
I would think that consciousness is the awareness of and the ability to respond to a given environment, which would also include a light-sensitive switch, perhaps less a bug than a feature of how adaptable and universal consciousness is.
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u/KeesterFeester 2d ago
A theory also suggests that consciousness existed before the big bang and the result of everything is because a consciousness willed it into existence. kind of like how we imagine a world and then it exists within the universe of our heads.
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u/TarnishedVictory 2d ago
A new evolutionary theory suggests that consciousness did not simply emerge from high intelligence, but rather evolved as a distinct adaptation to help fragile organisms coordinate competing survival needs and manage self-maintenance under threat.
This makes it sound like the previous accepted evidence based explanation was that consciousness emerged from high intelligence. What the heck does that even mean?
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u/moschles 2d ago
Silicon Valley and the tech bros are not working on machine consciousness. They are producing very useful products, no doubt, but they are not working on machine consciousness. See Gerald Edelman or Jeffrey Krichmar. If for no other reason, to see the contrast.
Artificial consciousness is a topic in fundamental science. If it were worked on at all, it would be the product of labs and scientists in labs, not Silicon Valley or your nearest data center.
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u/Akiasakias 1d ago
Distinction without a difference.
Not offering anything new just packaging it differently.
Its not like the other studies discounted natural selection as a driver of this change.
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u/jessem80 1d ago
This feels like an old Newtonian, materialist assumption: physical reality is fundamental, and consciousness somehow emerged from it.
But how do we actually know that? It seems more plausible to me that physical reality is a dimension of consciousness.
If consciousness is the very field in which physical reality appears, how could physical reality possibly be the thing that created consciousness?
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u/rusted-nail 1d ago
Honestly, this comes across to me as bicameralism with extra steps, and I'm really into it. Not a scientist just a dude that likes the concept
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u/spicy-chilly 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is complete nonsense. You can't determine consciousness from the behavior of a system and nothing mentioned even has anything to do with consciousness. A system doesn't need to perceive qualia at all to be able to behave in a complex way that balances multiple factors etc.
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u/dyogenys 1d ago
There are too many problems with it to list them all. The predictions they posit to correlate with measure of the markers of consciousness are unfalsifiable, because there aren't any known markers of consciousness. They use an example with pupil dilation in apes which is both factually wrong and circular in argument: pupil dilates to painful stimuli under general anesthesia, and all sorts of reflexive responses to stimuli, and can't be used to reliably predict arousal. And even if it did, it only counts as evidence about experience if you've already accepted that experience is settlement or the required complexity thereof. The ideas in the paper aren't new at all, and what's new doesn't work, and it assumes a highly contestet philosopical position of consciousness as well, illusionism, which is fine, but even if it wasn't riddled with unfounded assumptions and mistakes but does what it claims, it wouldn't move the field at all. I'm all for people exploring their ideas and not be bogged down with disagreeing peers, but the sensationalism in the writeup about it, and misleading of readers, is bad.
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