Is the Science of Consciousness Using Systems Thinking?
Stuart Hameroff is a notable contemporary scientist and administrator, having pioneered a fascinating and perhaps powerful theory of biologically-mediated consciousness and a long-running symposium at the University of Arizona (TSC) which has facilitated considerable freedom of thought in contemporary academics. Stuart is known for the Anything Goes! mantra at TSC, for a call for Revolution in neuroscience and for an affinity, shared by one of us (Carl), for Bhaktivedanta philosophy.
We (Alessandra and Carl) have introduced an innovative, positive approach in consciousness science, to be underwritten by experimentalism, and we have been well-received at TSC both in 2006 and in 2022, where we did Poster presentations. As of the current date it is uncertain whether or not our self-updating proposal on conversation and consciousness will find favor this year, 2024, in Arizona.
With the astonishing advent of large language models (LLMs) and the real possibility of imminent artificial general intelligence (AGI), systems thinking, pioneered materially by Jay Wright Forrester in the post-war 20th century, is beginning to look like the indispensable general paradigm in science, engineering and society. Systems thinking supplies concepts and techniques that allow investigators to solve engineering problems in highly complex systems, the brain for example, by treating these systems scrupulously as wholes, never as complexes containing cleanly separable elements.
Our proposed innovation for consciousness science is made on the basis of such holism. We see conversation as an indispensable but theoretically untouched component of consciousness. TSC has in recent memory admonished us that by attempting to treat conversation as such a component we seem to be making normative and political claims, and these are unacceptable. But it’s not hard to see the logical problems such a position incurs.
The whole of Western philosophy has accumulated a corpus of normative and political musings, and these have indeed had a very great deal to do with the history of human civilization. But how and in what manner TSC, pre-eminently a philosophical initiative, seeks to divorce itself from the reality of history looks pretty untenable to us.
Certainly the participants at TSC are people of decency and good will. There are no charlatans among them. Neither are Alessandra and Carl (A&C), currently uninvited and apparently unwanted at TSC 2024, mere charlatans. A&C are or would be an unusually clear voice adding to the great strength of intellectual diversity at TSC. Conversation, notwithstanding the non-personal, electrodynamic shapes of our somatic cells and even the imponderable shapes of space-time itself, constitutes consciousness. Consciousness is deeply personal, not impossibly separated from the systems that compose it. Consciousness is a living feature of life on earth, and probably of the forms that survive biological life and carry on, for better or for worse, in the great cosmos after death.
