From: jimruttshow8596
The progression of life from simple organisms to complex, intelligent, and conscious beings can be understood through the lens of adaptive complexity and information processing [07:58:00]. Life, as adaptive complexity, learns and self-corrects, making it a phenomenon that can survive and spread without apparent limit [01:07:29], [01:07:33], [01:07:51].
Evolution as Knowledge Creation
Evolution is a knowledge creation process through blind variation and natural selection [00:38:02], [00:38:07]. Organisms make copies of themselves, and genetic mutations introduce new designs [00:38:14], [00:38:20]. Designs that effectively predict and interact with the environment persist, while dysfunctional ones are weeded out [00:38:32], [00:38:36], [00:38:40]. This process of natural selection acts as an information channel, allowing organisms to become more statistically correlated with their environment [00:50:09], [00:50:11].
This accumulated genetic information, or adaptive information, is considered “knowledge” because it reduces environmental uncertainty for the organism [00:39:12], [00:39:17], [00:39:23]. The biosphere itself is seen as a memory system, encoding adaptive solutions discovered by life to persist far from equilibrium [00:51:56], [00:52:00], [00:52:07].
Agency: A Precursor to Consciousness
Agency is defined as goal-oriented, purposeful, or teleological movement in living systems [00:47:42], [00:47:45]. Unlike inanimate objects, which move only by external forces, organisms exhibit inherent goal-directed behavior, such as a bacterium swimming towards food or a plant growing towards sunlight [00:47:24], [00:47:39], [00:47:50].
This agency is a product of adaptive information encoded in the system through evolutionary processes [00:48:02]. It’s a behavioral output of information processing systems programmed by evolution to evade disorder [00:52:21], [00:52:25], [00:52:29]. While agency is a form of intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily imply consciousness [00:46:57].
The Role of Brains and Information Processing
The emergence of brains marks a significant shift in information processing capabilities, moving beyond phylogenetic (generational) learning to ontogenetic (real-time) learning [00:42:37], [00:42:41]. Brains enable an organism to encode the consequences of its actions and form memories, creating a “data variable” for the agent and allowing it to become aware of itself in a rudimentary sense [01:33:01], [01:33:51], [01:34:04].
The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis
The Bayesian brain hypothesis, particularly the active inference paradigm, proposes that for a system to persist, it must minimize its prediction error [00:59:10], [00:59:15], [01:00:08]. This process, seen in how a baby learns to reach for a bottle, involves correcting errors to achieve goals, leading to the minimization of the world model’s prediction error [01:00:26], [01:01:28], [01:01:35]. Prediction error, in this context, refers to the difference between the brain’s internal model of the world and the actual world [01:02:17], [01:02:21].
This minimization of prediction error is essential for survival, ensuring that the brain’s internal model of the environment is increasingly accurate and robust [01:01:40], [01:02:29].
Defining and Locating Consciousness
The concept of consciousness can be distinguished into two types:
- Phenomenal Consciousness: Raw sensation and subjective experience, a unified, cohesive field of experience with a point of view [01:37:16], [01:37:21]. Proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) suggest the substrate for this is in the posterior hot zone at the back of the brain [01:37:58], [01:38:00].
- Access Consciousness: The ability to consciously think about and access information, such as rehearsing a phone number or recalling a friend’s image [01:37:30]. This is considered more sophisticated and is associated with the frontal lobe, according to Global Workspace Theory [01:38:10], [01:38:13].
While some theories like Integrated Information Theory suggest even simple single-celled organisms could have some form of phenomenal consciousness, this view is debated [01:34:51], [01:34:55]. Critics argue that systems can have high integrated information without being conscious, suggesting information is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness [01:41:48], [01:41:49], [01:41:51].
From an evolutionary purpose and cost of consciousness perspective, consciousness is seen as a specific biological process that evolved because it is useful, despite being energetically expensive [01:30:40], [01:30:44]. It serves as a tool for information processing, enabling more efficient use of resources and aiding in reproduction [01:31:15], [01:31:21].
Group Mind and Future Evolution of Consciousness
The concept of a “group mind” or “global brain” refers to interconnected human networks like the internet performing collective computation, similar to biological brains [01:22:42], [01:22:46], [01:23:04], [01:23:08]. While this represents integrated information processing, it doesn’t necessarily imply a single, conscious global mind or agent [01:43:38], [01:43:41]. For a group mind to become a super-consciousness, the integrated information (phi) of the larger network would likely need to exceed that of the individual brains composing it [01:43:57], [01:44:00], [01:44:05]. This points to a potential future evolutionary transition in the nature of consciousness.
Cosmic Evolution and Teleology
The universe, as a system, is seen as fundamentally creative, generating novelty, with life and consciousness as its products [01:59:59], [02:00:04], [02:00:07], [02:00:10]. This perspective views cosmic evolution as a process of recursive emergence and hierarchical self-organization, where matter organizes into larger, integrated systems that multiply and form even larger ones [01:23:23], [01:23:26], [01:23:31], [01:23:33].
This suggests a “cosmic goal” where the universe as a whole acts as a self-organizing adaptive system [01:26:03]. The growth of intelligence leads to the realization of challenges like a star’s eventual death, creating an imperative for intelligent life to spread through the universe [01:24:46], [01:25:00], [01:25:12]. From this viewpoint, the persistence and spread of life and consciousness are central to the unfolding of reality itself [01:59:32], [01:59:35].