Consciousness: What's it for?

In this talk, Mark Solms will outline the novel approach to this problem that he has taken in his recent work as reported in his new book, the Hidden Spring: a journey to the source of consciousness. The argument begins with the claim that it is a mistake to take human cognition as our model example of consciousness. Why tackle the problem from its most complex end? If we begin with the simplest forms of animal consciousness, he argues, the ‘hard problem’ becomes less hard.

I shall continue to use the riding a bicycle analogy until I find a better one.

If you watch someone cycling, you see the legs powering the pedals that turn a chain that propel the bicycle (with person) forwards. It looks as if cycling is a function of pedalling.

Now, try to recall being unable to ride a bike. It quickly becomes obvious that pedalling is precisely what makes you fall over. Yet it looks so simple! What is the problem?

The original hypothesis that cycling is a function of pedalling is wrong - something else is needed. What is missing is that the body is balancing. It is an invisible function to an observer. As the observer cannot see the balancing-function, he thinks it is not there - until the observer becomes the cyclist.

We learnt to walk on two legs when we were too young to register the learning as a new function. Learning to ride a bike is a similar but expanded skill. Learning to cycle is an expansion of our balancing-consciousness into a dynamic-balancing-consciousness.

It takes very little time for cycling to become an automatic skill and hence we forget that it was an expansion of our consciousness. Perhaps people should try riding a unicycle to bring back the experience of expanding one's control functions.

If you think this has little to do with consciousness, recall that the skill of balancing is retained as a kinetic memory and stored within our nervous system. All athletes and musicians will have come across "muscle memory" but the muscles are the phenomenon of neurological memory.

What does this have to do with the video?

Well, recent research, as elucidated by Mark Solms, is approaching the idea of consciousness as an energetic phenomenon, involving both physics and neurology. Why do we need consciousness at all when we do most things on automatic?

We need consciousness in situations where the automated algorithms don't work.

Consciousness is there to make decisions in the absence of any precedents.

It is needed when we need to balance in a new way.

It is an affective phenomenon.

That uses up extra energy.

Then it can go to sleep again.

That is the great tragedy of human existence: forgetting that consciousness is always there, just because life can exist without it for much of the time.

One thing that seems to be rarely taught is that enlightenment is not a one-time experience. That is just the start. The next step is to learn to balance that new-found consciousness with the daily influx of events. You have discovered the art of balancing - but you still need to pedal at the same time.