Evolving Consciousness: Insights From Turing, and the Shaping of Experience

Abstract

A number of conceptual difficulties arise when considering the evolutionary origin of consciousness from the pre-conscious condition. There are parallels here with biological pattern formation, where, according to Alan Turing’s original formulation of the problem, the statistical properties of molecular-level processes serve as a source of incipient pattern. By analogy, the evolution of consciousness can be thought of as depending in part on a competition between alternative variants in the microstructure of synaptic networks and/or the activity patterns they generate, some of which then serve as neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Assuming that NCCs perform this function only if reliably ordered in a particular and precise way, Turing’s formulation provides a useful conceptual framework for thinking about how this is achieved developmentally, and how changes in neural structure might correlate with change at the level of conscious experience. The analysis is largely silent concerning the nature and ultimate source of conscious experience, but shows that achieving sentience is sufficient to begin the process by which evolution elaborates and shapes that first experience. By implication, much of what evolved consciousness achieves in adaptive terms can in principle be investigated irrespective of whether or not the ultimate source of real-time experience is known or understood. This includes the important issue of how precisely NCCs must be structured to ensure that each evokes a particular experience as opposed to any other. Some terminological issues are clarified, including that of “noise,” which here refers to the statistical variations in neural structure that arise during development, not to sensory noise as experienced in real time.