Download Choice, Ethics and the Evolutionary Function of

Choice, Ethics and the Evolutionary Function of Consciousness
Wendell Wallach
WW Associates, 7 Loeffler Road, Bloomfield, CT 06002 [email protected]
Abstract
Contemporary research suggests that conscious attention, thought and reflection either
have no role in decision-making and consciousness is merely observing or reporting choices
made by unconscious internal processes, or the role of consciousness is limited and not well
understood. In humans, as in all species, most information is processed unconsciously by
emotional (instinctual) and cognitive mechanisms. The emotional or instinctual mechanisms can
crudely process vague or confusing internal impulses and forces arising from the outer
environment. Internal impulses are often related to forces arising from the environment in that
the unconscious limbic system gives rise to emotional responses to influences (stimuli) coming
from outside of the organism. The unconscious cognitive mechanisms, which are essentially
mechanical, can only process information which is clear or well structured. Like computers,
these unconscious cognitive mechanisms do not need to know anything about the semantic
content of the information being processed.
Learning is largely the ability to develop more complex unconscious processing
mechanisms or restructure existing mechanisms. Kandel’s work indicates that even primitive
organisms have neuroplasticity and can learn new behavior. In more sophisticated organisms,
learning introduces branching into unconscious action sequences. The course of action taken is
causally determined and triggered by stimuli that arise from the outer environment. For us
humans, the central question is whether all choice is causally determined in this manner, or
whether we have some capacity to actively program or alter unconscious action sequences.
Conscious thought processes do not precipitate actions directly, but only have an effect to
the extent that they influence the unconscious processing of information and internal impulses to
act. Consciousness is the directing of our attention to information that cannot be assimilated by
unconscious processing mechanisms, because the information is unclear or incomplete. When it
is possible to clarify or complete the information through attention, the information will
automatically be reintroduced for processing by unconscious cognitive mechanisms. If the
information remains incomplete, it must be interpreted or valued in order to give it a form where
it can be processed by unconscious mechanisms. As Libet theorizes, conscious attention directed
inward can arrest or defuse impulses to act -- stop action sequences in progress. In this manner
conscious attention directed inward can also program new branches onto existing action
sequences.
Keywords: Ethics, emergence, consciousness, choice, freewill
Choice and Ethics
Decision-making, moral reasoning and ethics only make sense in a context where there are
choices. We generally don’t think of animals as moral actors because we doubt that they, with a
few possible exceptions, such as great apes, dolphins, and ravens, can choose between alternative
courses of action. Instinct is a word that requires considerable clarification (Bateson, 2000), but
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it functions to capture the thesis that the actions of most animals are biochemical, mechanical,
and emotional responses to stimuli that do not entail any conscious reflection or choice. Humans,
on the other hand, make choices, and believe they have the intelligence and freedom to weigh
which course of action is appropriate, morally correct, or will lead to desirable consequences.
But what are we to make of computers that parse through information according to programmed
procedures that can lead to different courses of action? Are they just mechanically processing
information, or, as some computer scientists wish to contend, can this kind of activity be a form
of at least functionally conscious decision-making? What criteria, if any, do we have for
discriminating a mechanical or computational procedure from an active choice or explicit moral
reasoning?
While philosophical discussion over the possibility that we live in a deterministic
universe and lack any real choice or free will can be fascinating, we each have the
phenomenological experience that we do indeed freely select from among various options and
thereby give form to our lives through our actions. But more recently neuroscientists,
evolutionary psychologists, and legal theorists have argued that there may be limits on the kinds
of choices we actually have, and the extent to which our thoughts and reflections direct our
actions.
Ever since Benjamin Libet (1983) discovered evidence of a readiness potential (RP)
preceding apparent decisions by subjects to act, there has been considerable discussion as to
whether neuroscience is in the process of undermining free will and any sensible doctrine of
moral responsibility. The RP is a neo-cortical indication of an impulse to act. The issue arises
because the RP is evident at least 350 milliseconds before the subjects report that they had
decided in the experiment to flex their wrists, suggesting that their conscious decision did not
actually lead to the act, but was rather a reporting of an act already in progress. Is there
conscious will acting on our brains and giving rise to actions or is free will an illusion and our
actions largely directed by instinctual mechanisms arising from the unconscious?
Libet (2000) falls among those who do not believe that his discovery of a readiness
potential undermines the possibility of free will. But theorists continue to debate what his
experiments actually demonstrate. However, one thing that has become increasingly clear is that
the simplistic notion of a direct link between thought and action does not begin to accommodate
the complexity of factors that influence human behavior. There is a crucial interplay between
conscious thinking and unconscious processing that is little understood. We, like our mammalian
relatives, are largely unconscious creatures. The conscious attention we give to one influence or
another or to our reflections about a choice is but a thin slice in the vast multitude of factors,
forces, and information that give form to each moment of activity. The unconscious mind can be
thought of as engaged in massive parallel processing, while the conscious mind deals with
thoughts and information sequentially. While consciousness only represents a small glimpse of
the information being processed by the human organism in any one moment, this by no means
answers the question of whether the conscious mind can initiate an action. But if conscious
thoughts lead to actions they do so primarily through the influence they have on a plethora of
unconscious processes.
In the Christian worldview, each human is endowed with an immoral soul that gives us a
capacity for sentience, consciousness, and a moral aptitude. We are born with the freedom to
choose all our actions, even while we are challenged to attune our souls to the will of an
omniscient God, who embodies the expression of goodness and truth. Our immaterial souls have
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a privileged comprehensive view of our situation, make decisions, and thereby direct our body to
act. The doctrine of a free will has been extended to and presumed as being foundational for
non-religious philosophical thought in the West. From this perspective, ethical principles serve
to restrict and direct the behavior of humans who are presumed to be free.
What Libet’s findings, as well as those of other scientists (Faraday 1853, Wegner and
Wheatley 1999, Wegner 2002, Dennett 2003), challenge is the notion of a soul or center of self
that gives rise to decisions and initiates actions. As Dennett (1991) has pointed out, there is no
Cartesian Theater, no evident place in the mind where “ I” reside, and where all input comes
together to be acted upon by “me”, the executive decision-maker with the conscious power to
act; even though it may feel as if we each function from just such a center of self.
In contrast to the Christian worldview, the evolutionary perspective is that of successful
survival machines reproducing and mutating into generation after generation of new species, new
survival experiments. The philosophical and ethical challenge posed by evolutionary theory is to
either elucidate why choice, freedom and phenomenological consciousness might emerge
through the essentially mechanical unfoldment of natural selection, or to demonstrate that choice,
freedom, and phenomenological consciousness are illusions. If the later is true, do we have any
basis for holding individuals morally responsible for their actions? Do we have a naturalistic
foundation for ethics?
Dennett (2003) argues that evolution has given rise to a limited form of free will in that
humans have evolved a capacity to weigh options and select from various courses of action. He
uses the example of a baseball player who is about to be hit by a pitch. The ball player can either
choose to let the ball hit him or can choose to get out of the way of the ball. Which action he
elects will be determined by whether he didn’t want to be hit at that moment by the ball, or
whether he had decided that allowing the ball to hit him would serve the interest of his team in
winning the game.
Humans in this sense have more freedom than snails. Eric Kandel’s research on the sea
slug, Aplysia californica, demonstrates that even these primitive species have neural plasticity
and can learn new behavior, but they are far from the more sophisticated species in which similar
stimuli can lead to different action sequences. What Dennett proposes is that the human nervous
system has evolved to accommodate rich branching in the action sequences available to us, and
therefore nuanced responses to subtle differences in situation and stimuli. But this by no means
demonstrates that what we choose is a totally free act. Other factors – the desire to win the game
and the analysis of whether allowing one self to get hit by the ball will help win given the stage
of the game – influence and determine what action the ball player will select.
The kind of freedom that Dennett proposes is inherently unsatisfying for those of us who
yearn to invest humans with free will and unbounded responsibility for their actions. After all,
such compatibilist solutions don’t rule out the possibility that every action we will choose has
been determined. It clearly opens the door to the kind of legal arguments we have been
witnessing where defendants plead not guilty for actions that were supposedly outside of their
realm of choice due to a lack of mental development or diminished capacity. But Dennett argues
that our ability to choose is adequate to hold individual’s fully responsible for their actions.
The Emergence of Consciousness and the Birth of Choice
At some crucial stage in evolution, an animal made the transition from preconceptual
adaptive behavior to an organism that periodically engaged in a conscious deliberation about
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what it perceived. In all likelihood, this was a very crude form of deliberation, somewhere on
the cusp between an instinctual response to stimuli and the rudimentary representation of
information.
We don’t know exactly what fitness function consciousness filled in evolving species.
My theory is that consciousness facilitated the accommodation of unclear or incomplete
information. Unclear or incomplete refers to information that can not be easily assimilated by
unconscious instinctual, biochemical, or computational mechanisms. Unclear information will
require sustained attention and interfere with other activities. I imagine a great ape, or even a
monkey, on the plains of Africa concentrating on a distant predator. Perhaps our primate
ancestor has already learned two instinctual action sequences for when the predator is a threat
and when the predator is resting or evidently not looking for food. On this particular day a lion
stays at a distance that is neither so far away that the ape can relax into a minimal monitoring of
the predator’s movements, nor close enough to activate an instinctual flight. In other words,
whatever instinctual mechanisms the primate has, or cognitive mechanisms for unconsciously
mapping perceptions to memories or other forms of stored information, do not trigger an action
sequence. Necessity would require that the primate maintain its attention on the predator and be
distracted from other important activities such as foraging and care of the young, until either an
existing action sequence is activated, or a branching to a different action sequence is learned.
Baar (1997) hypothesizes that attention alone is enough for learning. Certainly sustained stimuli
will potentiate neuronal connections that in turn strengthen existing responses or give rise to new
responses.
A new response might emerge due to a competing impulse to act, such as hunger. The
competing emotion is a pressure to move on and redirect energy toward meeting this need. But
the organism will not be able to shift its focus unless and until something tips the scale and
clarifies the response to the predator’s presence. Without an instinctual signal that tips the scale
toward a particular action sequence, the primate will need to interpret or value the information in
a manner that facilitates processing and invokes a simple impulse to act. Anthropomorphic
concepts such as “error on the side of caution” or “relax” are well beyond this primitive form of
interpreting or valuing unclear information so that it can be processed, but they do capture the
basic heuristic implicit in such clarifications. If more than one heuristic can be applied to
functionally clarify incomplete information, and each of these heuristics leads to a different
action sequence, then we have a choice.
These primitive heuristics might be thought of as the birth of ethics. As branches in
action pathways increase, memory storage expands, and language evolves; unclear or incomplete
forms of information will become more evident and opportunities to apply heuristics that resolve
competing needs will grow. For an animal, any choice that leads back to an essentially
unconscious homeodynamic relationship with its group and to its environment is a successful
choice. But no doubt some choices match up more accurately with the underlying conditions. A
truly bad choice might indeed undermine the capacity to return to a more settled state. If, in
effect, the primate has determined that the predator is not a threat, but the predator is in fact
hungry, the primate’s survival may be threatened.
Any form of valuing or interpretation that reflects the factual condition more accurately
will have a higher degree of success in maximizing the return to and the free expression of the
unconscious adaptive faculties of the organism. One might think of this as a Homeodynamic
Theory of Moral Reasoning (HMR).
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Conclusion
In light of his discovery of a readiness potential, Libet’s (2000) candidate for the
possibility of free will is the prospect that consciousness can veto or arrest impulses that arise
from within the unconscious mind. While there are serious questions whether such a capacity
exists or would be effective against strong emotional impulses, therapeutic practices do suggest
that attention directed inwardly can lead to many kinds of alterations in emotional patterns from
molding these impulses to catharsis. Meditators and other practitioners of introspective practices
commonly perceive that attention to inner feelings, impulses, and movements can alter the
character of those forces.
In our example of the primate and the lion, where information is unclear, and there is no
one distinct or strong action sequence arising from the unconscious, the prospect of arresting or
defusing impulses that do arise from the unconscious is more probable. In fact this scenario is
compatible with a state of sustained attention leading to the possibility of a branch to a new or
altered action sequence.
Consciousness and the ability to engage in choice and explicit moral reasoning are
generally assumed to be related but independent faculties. No doubt consciousness is necessary
for moral reasoning, but this paper proposes a theory in which rudimentary forms of choice
evolve along with and as an intrinsic aspect of consciousness. Consciousness and decisionmaking emerge interdependently as the functional ability to manage incomplete information in a
manner that would allow it to be utilized by unconscious processes.
The appearance and development of methods for the valuation and interpretation of
information moves species beyond biological adaptation into cultural evolution. In humans this
capacity expands exponentially. The question haunting humanity is whether our relationship to
our thoughts, thinking, capacity to imagine and plan serve adaptation to our environment and to
the presence of other agents and entities in our environment or whether our relationship to these
faculties has become severed from the initial homeodynamic functions they served. A greater
understanding of the relationship between unconscious processing and consciousness may help
us clarify whether we have the capacity to do a better job of organizing unconscious impulses
and the processing of information by unconscious cognitive mechanisms.
References
Baars, B.J. (1997); In The Theatre of Consciousness; Oxford University Press
Bateson. P. (2000); Taking the Stink out of Instinct; Rose, H. And Rose, S. (Eds.): Alas Poor Darwin;
Harmony Books
Dennett. D. (2003); Freedom Evolves; Viking Penguin
Faraday, M.(1853); Experimental investigations of table moving; The Athenaeum 1340, 801-3
Libet, B. (1985);Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action; The
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8, 529-39.
Libet, B. (ed.) (2000); The Volitional Brain: Toward a Neuroscience of Free Will; Imprint Academic
Wegner, D.M. and Wheatley, T. (1999); Apparent mental causation;sources of the experience of will;
American Psychologist 54, 480-92
Wegner, D.M. (2002); The Illusion of Conscious Will; MIT Press
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