From: jimruttshow8596
Terence Deacon, a professor of anthropology and neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, explores the concept of sentience as a fundamental precursor to consciousness, defining different levels of awareness based on how systems interact with their environment and maintain themselves [01:16:02]. His work investigates the emergence of conscious experience by brains [00:03:34].
Defining Sentience
Deacon defines sentience in a very broad sense, beginning with the simplest possible form [01:19:56]. At its core, sentience is the ability of a system to be “aware of its environment” in a fundamental way, organized to be differentially reactive to its surroundings in a manner that supports its self-maintenance and persistence [01:20:08]. This implies a fundamental division of the world into what is “good for me and what’s bad for me,” even without explicit knowledge or representation [01:20:30]. This sensitivity marks a transition from mere “chemistry to normative chemistry” – where chemical interactions become evaluated as beneficial or detrimental to the system’s continued existence [01:22:57].
Simple Sentience: The Autogen Model
To illustrate the simplest form of sentience, Deacon proposes a theoretical “autogen” model, a thought experiment grounded in molecular processes [01:48:49]. An autogen is a system where two “morphodynamic processes” (order-generating processes) are balanced against each other, preventing each other from dissipating and collectively maintaining a higher-order constraint—the system’s very existence [00:43:05, 00:46:16, 00:49:46].
In this model:
- A “reciprocal catalytic process” (where catalyst A generates B, and B generates A) rapidly produces more of itself but also quickly consumes its raw materials, making it self-undermining [00:50:51, 00:51:52].
- A “capsid-like formation process” (similar to virus shell formation) consumes molecules to build a container, and this growth slows as materials are depleted [00:53:35, 00:54:36].
- When these two processes are synergistically linked, the catalytic process generates the molecules needed for capsid growth, while the capsid growth, in turn, contains the catalysts, preventing their diffusion and premature dissipation [00:55:01, 00:55:08, 00:56:04, 00:56:07].
This interdependent relationship allows the autogen to self-repair and reproduce, essentially maintaining its own existence [00:57:19, 00:57:22]. The autogen’s sentience comes from its surface having shapes that allow useful molecules to stick to it, which in turn weakens its containment [01:18:41]. This means it tends to break apart (and subsequently reform) in environments rich with raw materials, while remaining stable in non-supportive environments [01:19:12, 01:19:26, 01:19:33]. This differential reactivity is the simplest form of “aware[ness] of its environment” [01:18:34, 01:19:59].
Levels of Sentience
Deacon distinguishes between different levels of sentience, moving from the simple autogen to more complex forms:
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Vegetative Sentience: This level is exemplified by plants. While not having complex representations of their world, plants react differently to their environment – roots grow towards nutrients, and leaves orient towards light [01:21:30, 01:21:48]. They are “generating themselves with respect to their environment” [01:21:56].
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Subjective Sentience: This higher level of sentience is associated with animals possessing brains [01:22:14]. Unlike simpler forms, it involves having a “representation, a model of what the alternatives in the world are” [01:26:22, 01:26:25]. Brains enable organisms to predict and seek out what is “absent but could be” [01:29:30, 01:29:32]. The development of brains at the head-end of bilateral organisms is driven by the need for prediction and information processing to facilitate movement in space [01:29:37, 01:30:00].
The nervous system itself is described as a “nested teleo-dynamic process” [01:31:36, 01:31:39]. Every neuron is teleodynamic, striving to maintain itself even while being disturbed [01:33:29, 01:33:38]. The brain, as a network of these teleodynamic neurons, forms a higher-order teleodynamic structure that enables cognition and consciousness [01:33:55, 01:34:20].
- Feeling and Work: Feeling is fundamentally linked to “work” or “contra-grade” relationships, where a spontaneous process is disturbed [01:35:56, 01:36:01]. When something “wakes us up,” it’s because work is being done on the nervous system [01:36:14, 01:36:21]. This implies that thinking and mentality are not static states but dynamic processes, similar to music [01:43:59, 01:44:03, 01:45:15].
- Attention: Attention requires “work” or “effort” [01:39:25, 01:40:07]. It involves the nervous system initiating work to respond to a threat, hunger, or a conflicting thought process [01:41:03, 01:41:14, 01:41:40]. It is the result of balancing opposing “morphodynamic processes” – the internal self-maintaining dynamics and external inputs [01:45:50, 01:46:04].
- The Purpose of Consciousness: Deacon suggests that the job of consciousness is actually to make things unconscious [01:47:13]. The brain constantly processes information (e.g., the feeling of toes in shoes) but only brings it to conscious awareness when there’s a “difference that makes a difference”—something unexpected or requiring attention [01:48:04, 01:48:17, 01:48:23]. This is because the processing bandwidth of consciousness is very small, requiring most processes to be automatic and unconscious for efficiency [01:49:25, 01:49:30, 01:49:45].
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Deacon addresses David Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness, which questions why subjective experience arises from physical processes [01:51:06, 01:51:21]. This problem is akin to Zeno’s Paradox: the more we analyze the brain’s physical details, the further away the explanation for subjective experience seems to be [01:52:27, 01:52:34]. The “hard problem” implies that consciousness might be fundamentally different from physical phenomena, a version of Descartes’s dualism [01:53:01, 01:53:11, 01:53:40].
Deacon argues that this perceived difficulty stems from looking at the “wrong side of the story” [01:55:02, 01:55:05]. The solution lies not in more physical details or invoking mysterious quantum phenomena, but in understanding “absences” [01:55:19, 01:55:36, 01:55:40].
- Absences as Key: Consciousness, like all emergent phenomena, is defined by “systems of constraints” – what is not happening [01:54:34, 01:56:00, 01:56:10]. These constraints enable new kinds of “work,” which in turn produce new constraints, creating an emergent hierarchy [01:56:36, 01:57:27, 01:57:31].
- The Self as Dynamical Constraints: The self is not merely physical stuff, which constantly changes (e.g., atoms in the body are replaced over time) [01:56:19, 01:56:29]. Instead, “we are this dynamical system of constraints that keeps itself in existence” [01:56:39, 01:56:42].
- “Being is Doing”: Life, including consciousness, is an active process of “doing” [01:57:05, 01:57:07]. This “doing” is “work,” which involves the constrained dissipation of energy gradients [01:57:09, 01:57:15, 01:57:22].
Ultimately, Deacon posits that “absences matter” [01:55:40]. New absences (constraints) can emerge from existing ones, leading to fundamentally new forms of existence like human cognition and morality [01:58:40, 01:58:44, 01:58:48]. Our experience of self is because “we’re on the side of those absences, we are those absences” [01:58:57, 01:59:00]. This perspective suggests that understanding consciousness requires an inversion of traditional scientific thought, focusing on what is not present to understand how mind emerges from matter [01:55:36, 01:59:15].