How Consciousness is Made 4: The Ladder of Purpose

The hierarchy of thinking in our physical reality.

TECHNICAL LEVEL: EASY FOR EVERYONE

And Jacob took one of the stones and put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed and beheld a ladder set upon the earth and the top of the ladder reached to heaven. 
   .Genesis, 28:11.

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There is cosmic structure to Mind. Cosmic structure to the flow of purpose. By cosmic, I mean that in all the universe, purpose heeds the same rules.

The flow of purpose on Earth is the flow of purpose in the Heavens, as Newton once claimed for the universality of gravity.

In our reality, the cosmic structure of purpose is a ladder. Each rung on the ladder of purpose is a different stage of thinking. In this chapter, we’ll review the stages of thinking that exist on Earth and pinpoint where the magical activity of consciousness—resonance!—dances upon the ladder.

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What does the ladder of purpose stand upon? Aimlessness. Which we might call quantum physics. The predictable randomness of the subatomic realm.

Minds and the activity of purpose can only exist in a physical reality with a substrate comprised of predictably random bits of activity. Put simply, the ladder of purpose rises out of purposelessness.

For a very long dull time—two billion years or more—living bodies abided on Earth without any minds. Vagabond microbes drifted with the currents or wee organisms clung fast to stone and basked in sun’s life-warming rays.

Then one fateful day, the first mind emerged out of the substance of a living body. A sensor and a doer began to interact with one another and the body’s environment, sparking the first mindwhirl.

Perhaps the first sensor was a light-sensitive molecule. Perhaps the first doer a simple whip propelling the body forward. The light-sensitive molecule became the “front” of the body and activated a whip-doer at the “rear” of the body.

Voila! Direction and purpose have manifested in the cosmos! A molecular mindwhirl begins to spin and a super-simple thinking creature begins to stalk the light.

Behold the first rung on the ladder of purpose: the bacteria minds.

Organisms whose thinking elements are individual molecules.

.3 Bacteria Thinking

Protozoa (like amoebas), bacteria (like salmonella), and archaea (Earth’s oldest organism, like the Great Salt Lake’s pinkish haloarchaea) all boast “bacteria minds.”

These first-rung minds conduct the simplest form of thinking in the universe. Slow, fuzzy, unreliable sensing and doing. But in a world of aimless matter, even the dimmest of purpose is infinitely better than no purpose at all. A one-legged man gathers more corn than any scarecrow.

Every bacteria mind safeguards a molecular mindwhirl whose sensors and doers are molecules. Each molecular mindwhirl adapts to its local microscopic environment.

As bacteria minds evolved and grew smarter and engaged with a wider range of chaos—a wider range of space, time, and complexity—they had to think bigger. As it happens, thinking bigger is not a simple function of adding more molecules to a mind. Thinking bigger requires a whole new configuration of thought. A whole new layer of thinking activity.

For bacteria minds to think bigger, they ascended the second rung of the ladder of purpose and became bumblebee minds.

.4 Bumblebee thinking

When single-celled thinking organisms (like amoebas) became thinking cells (neurons) inside a multi-cellular organism, bumblebee minds were born.

Neurons weave together like spiderwebs to form networks of neurons in the minds of invertebrates, including jellyfish, worms, and insects. The topmost thinking elements in bumblebee minds are individual networks. In a bumblebee mind (including the minds of slugs, starfish, and spiders), networks of neurons serve as sensors and doers instead of molecules. The jellyfish, for instance, employs a doer network to propel itself through the water.

Here's what’s so important to understand about second-rung bumblebee minds and the ladder of purpose:

Each neuron in a bumblebee mind is a bacteria mind with its own private mindwhirl.

This is how purpose ascends the ladder and masters an ever-greater range of chaos: by linking similar minds together to forge a more capable collective mind. The collective mind is powered by the aggregate thinking of its constituent minds.

The integration of independent little minds into a single big mind greatly expands the collective mind’s ability to perceive and act upon the world.

Instead of a single mindless molecule reacting to photons in fixed fashion like a toothpick, a neuron can process more nuanced patterns of light and even modulate its response according to the context. By arranging neuron-doers and neuron-sensors into networks that come to serve as network-doers and network-sensors, the bumblebee mind expands its perceptual and behavioral repertoire.

In every bumblebee mind, including the minds of hydras, horseflies, and Harlequin shrimp, two layers of thinking flow simultaneous: neuron-to-neuron thinking and molecule-to-molecule thinking.

Now we can see how the ladder of purpose gets built. How minds ascend to greater resilience, intelligence, and compassion. One layer of thinking (one rung on the ladder of purpose) develops and complexifies and diversifies. Then the minds on this rung (such as bacteria minds) develop a new way to communicate with one another (such as cell-to-cell chemical communication). Gradually this new form of mind-to-mind connectivity leads to tighter and tighter integration between minds on the same rung until they become interlinked so snugly that a distinct new layer of thinking emerges on top of the old.

A smart new rung is added to the ladder of purpose.

.5 Monkey thinking

Out of the bumblebee minds arose the monkey minds.

All Earthborn beasts with backbones possess monkey minds, save one. All fish, all amphibians, all reptiles, all birds, and all but one mammal possess brains where the topmost thinking element is a module.

A module is a set of neural networks that join together to pursue a new joint purpose.

Some examples:

The visual What module determines what a viewed object is.

The visual Where module determines where a viewed object is.

The auditory What module determines what a heard sound is.

The When module determines when in a sequence a particular item falls, such as the area code in an American phone number.

The visual Scene module creates a portrait of the visual environment.

The auditory Scene module creates a portrait of the sound environment.

The How module determines how to move the body to reach a target.

The Why module determines why we should pursue a particular person, object, or goal by assigning feelings to the various options.

The Freewill module acts by triggering behavior.

Monkey minds form the third rung of the ladder of purpose. They’ve added a third module-to-module layer of thinking on top of the neuron-to-neuron and molecule-to-molecule layers.

Scientists call the ladder of purpose a recursive hierarchy. “Recursive” simply means that lower-rung minds get embedded “within” higher-rung minds:

Each brain module inside a monkey mind is an independent bumblebee mind with its own neural mindwhirl. Each neuron inside a bumblebee mind is an independent bacteria mind with its own molecular mindwhirl.

With the appearance of bumblebee minds, the mindwhirl greatly expanded the scope and authority of its purpose by employing networks as sensors and doers. With the appearance of monkey minds, an entire multi-network module can serve as a sensor module or a doer module.

The visual What module, for instance, is a high-powered sensor module. The What module perceives and identifies complex visual objects in the environment (That’s a bouncing basketball!) then shares these perceptions with the rest of the mind to determine how to respond.

The mind’s response may be initiated by the How module, a doer module. The How module moves the body toward a target, such as reaching for the basketball the sensor module (the What module) just detected.

When modules take on the roles of sensor and doer, a third-rung mindwhirl commences circling through the monkey mind:

sensing module→doer module→(larger scale) environment→sensing module.

But even as a bobcat’s mindwhirl paces the rhythms of its own “monkey mind,” smaller mindwhirls gyrate within the predatory feline’s modular mindwhirl.

It takes many little mindwhirls to power a big mindwhirl.

The emergence of “monkey minds” in fish about a half-billion years ago marked the advent on Earth of sophisticated decision-making over a broad scale of physical reality.

Bumblebee minds (such as scorpions, fire ants, and earthworms) engage with twigs, pebbles, and bits of sand.

In contrast, monkey minds ponder panoramas. Birds soar over mountains. Cheetahs sprint the African savannah. Whales circumnavigate the planet.

And chimpanzees plot to overthrow primate governments.

.6 Supermind thinking

Only one Earthborn beast has ascended to the fourth rung of the ladder of purpose. Humankind. We are the only beings in our solar system to attain the fourth layer of thinking: the supermind.

The topmost thinking element in a supermind is the brain. Yours, for instance. Homo sapiens brains communicate primarily through language, but also through a variety of other symbolic means, including grimaces, gesticulations, tattoos, and opera. In a supermind, not only do individual humans serve as sensors and doers—entire communities of humans can function as sensor or doer, too. Cable news, for instance, serves the same purposeful role in your supermind as a sensor module in your brain.

Our cerebrums are packed with circuitry designed to create superminds, join superminds, and think in harmony with superminds. Two supermind mechanisms are especially relevant for understanding human consciousness, which we will soon see is fundamentally different than chimpanzee consciousness.

The most crucial physical activity for building superminds is shared attention. Human brains boast sophisticated mind-to-mind mechanisms for merging the consciousness activity of two independent brains. Shared attention is an essential precursor and component of language—and precursor and component of the unique fourth-rung form of human consciousness.

The most potent thought-harmonizing supermind activity is tribalism. Tribalism is a deep-seated neural prejudice that causes brains to think their own supermind is smart, kind, and rational while that other supermind over there is witless, malevolent, and nuts.

Through a variety of thinking dynamics, including most prominently tribalism and shared attention, superminds drive their constituent brains to converge on the same shared beliefs, values, and goals in order to form an effective supermind mindwhirl.

Until very recently in the United States (perhaps the most advanced supermind on earth), the American mindwhirl’s main sensor was mainstream mass media. Journalists delivered their latest sensations to the rest of the supermind, provoking supermind doers (such as politicians, executives, consumers, and voters) to take action and change the supermind’s environment, which unleashed new stimuli for the journalists to sense, process, and report on. These days social media is thickening and quickening the supermind mindwhirl and rendering it more adaptive.

Monkey minds expanded the scope of purpose across continents and oceans.

Superminds blast purpose into the cosmic and the infinitesimal.

Machines built by superminds travel beyond our solar system to send back otherworldly sensations. Machines built by superminds peer back through time to ogle the very dawn of our observed universe. Machines built by superminds penetrate deep down beyond the diminutive scale of the atom to descry phantasmagoric leptons and quarks shuddering at the edge of nothingness.

All these machines are naturally evolving components of the supermind mindwhirl, little different than the naturally evolving pyramidal neurons in your prefrontal cortex.

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As you read this sentence, four distinct layers of thinking are flowing through your brain simultaneously. Eighty billion mindwhirls churn within your neurons. Hundreds (more?) mindwhirls churn within your neural networks. A couple dozen or so mindwhirls churn inside your modules. And your own brain’s mindwhirl, the mindwhirl of you, is caught up in the flow of a supermind mindwhirl.

In other words, every one of your thoughts simultaneously spans four rungs of the ladder of purpose.

How does consciousness fit into the ladder?

Resonance, the magical activity of consciousness, is a modular activity. Resonance reverberates on the third rung of the ladder of purpose. Resonance synchronizes the activity of two neural networks within the same module: the activity of a prediction network and the activity of a perception network.

Thus, consciousness is only found in third-rung minds or higher.

All Earthly vertebrates are conscious, because they all produce resonance within brain modules that bring together predictions and perceptions. Fish. Amphibians. Reptiles. Birds. Mammals. Almost all Earthly invertebrates are nonconscious, the potentially fascinating exceptions being the squid and octopus. They appear to have evolved third-rung thinking on a different trajectory up the ladder of purpose than the vertebrates. Does octopus mind = monkey mind? Determining whether a given organism is conscious—be it cuttlefish, android, or extraterrestrial—always comes down to the physical question of resonance.

If a mind can’t produce resonance it can’t produce consciousness.

Some of the modules in your head produce resonance. Others, no.

As a validity check on our account of consciousness so far, our story predicts that resonant modules should produce conscious experience and non-resonant modules should not.

True? Let’s find out!

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