Thoughts on consciousness

Why don’t we give children and adolescents the vote, i.e., allow them to make decisions about sex, alcohol, and war? The simple answer is because we accept the premise that they are as yet too young to grasp the full consequences of their action. If they can have no conception of the consequences of their actions, then how can they attain genuine awareness of what it is they’re doing? If our working description of consciousness is as the state of awareness concerning what it is we’re doing and, crucially, why we’re doing it, we may therefore be imply the conclusion that adolescents lack it, or at least that its yet incomplete.

I find it interesting that when we recall events from the past (even fairly recent past) it still seems as if they took place at a time before we gained the property of awareness we currently posses. Perhaps we might shrug off this uncomfortable feeling: bah... I was so x back then! where x is some accessible description of one’s own character or demeanor. In other words, I was at that time not yet come to my wits... unduly influenced by a deformation of awareness. Back then, we “didn’t know” about things that we do now. How naive we were. Surely, if you would have asked us at the time we thought we were aware, then we would have affirmed it to you as confidently as we would today. But if we know today that in the past we would have, in fact, been wrong, how can we be sure that we won’t be saying the same thing about right now some days or years in the future?

A week or so ago my professor of cognition asked us the question ‘what is consciousness’. It occurred to me that, whatever it is, it must have something to do with what I call the absolute presence of now. For lack of a better term, I’m talking about the cerebral rush of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, that collect together to form a pool of self-hood. Mirror! Mirror! On the water, who is the most x of them all? Compared with the absolute presence of now, memories from even a moment ago are pale shadows of their former glory. As the present slides inexorably forward on a line of time, what was the present becomes a memory and its characteristic intensity of the present will be ripped from it and rushed into what is coming.

Let’s restate what’s been suggested: consciousness is inseparable from the present, and it also appears to be the mechanism that confers intensity to impressions. If these two premises are true, then it would explain why memories are so pale: since consciousness is bound to the present, it cannot be applied to impressions from the past, for if it was we would be experiencing all over again the past with the absolute presence of now. Additionally, it seems these premises may also explain our apparent inability to ascribe consciousness to some minds from the past, as well as children and adolescents. Specifically, the mechanism of consciousness may play a role in how we generate theories of other minds (i.e., are able to perceive other people and animals as having minds). Without the personal experience of consciousness, we may be unable to incorporate the property of consciousness into a theory of other minds. Since we cannot experience consciousness within impressions from the past, we are unable to believe that minds in the past had consciousnesses either. In memories, everybody is sleepwalking, going about the world, interacting with people and things, but lacking awareness.

Putting this together: ‘Consciousness’ is a sensational result following an impulse whose function is to trap our attention around colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures happening now. If it didn’t carry out this function, we might wind up making decisions upon what was true in the past (but no longer). Obviously, this could be dangerous and may have been subject to evolutionary pressure. In sum, consciousness is only another cognitive bias on a long list of others. This consciousness bias causes us impressions from the present to stand out among impressions from the past, or memories, and thus exert greater influence on decisions to be made now. Impressions from the past may still be influential, but only in a preconscious, online process in which all impressions from the past are combined into a single feeling about is happening: a sense of goodness, comfort, stress, or danger, and reoccur as a new impression and considered along side the rest occurring now. Consciousness also seems to play a role in generating theories of mind, perhaps by establishing bounds around the impressions that influencing the decisions of others. Interestingly, we don’t treat all minds equally. Children made forgivable mistakes because they didn’t know any better, but criminals had intent. Genuine internal states seem more likely to be granted to people we distrust or are threatened by, but not those whom consider benign; i.e. children, adolescents, ourselves, and perhaps a close circle of kin who we can as well imagine being more like naive pawns of external conditions during the moment of any past actions, achieving at best only a deformed awareness that cannot be culpable for the consequences of its actions.

A question for another day: If consciousness is only a side-effect of a mechanism to bias evaluations of the newest impressions, can free will exist? It would there is very little left for a will to do. Rather, the hardware of the mind is estimating a utility function, or a fitness function, and discharging a behavior most likely to maximize the function.

Random thought on neuroscience and economics

As neuroimaging technologies become cheaper and more readily available to experimental game theorists at capable, yet modestly funded public universities, I expect increasingly close ties between behavioral economics and neuroscience, such that one day we may no longer distinguish between the two at all.

The convergence of behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience is a natural partnership. In recent decades, economists have had to face the facts that human behavior consistently deviates from the expectations of their rational actor models. Evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides helped to make this disparity intelligible, reframing the problem in a Darwinian, adaptationist logic: The basis of behavioral economics should not be rationality in action, but “rationality in design”.

To accept this principle was for behavioral economists an acknowledgment of a biological basis of human behavior. However difficult a pill this was to swallow, an evolutionary biological perspective offered something potentially invaluable to behavioral economists. The workhorse unit of measurement in microeconomics, utility, has only existed thus far as an abstraction. For the biologist, there is a physical record of utility in the form of genetic code and by extension physical and behavioral traits. This utility was truly experienced and had contributed to the successful life and reproduction of an organism; its genetic signature selected for preservation by natural selection.

The genetic signatures of behavioral traits are manifest as physical structures in the brain. The study of how cognition emerges from these structures is called neuroscience. Though neuroscientists study nervous systems generally and make use of opportunities to study all kinds of them, from simple manifestations like that of the nematode worm to the more complex variety of vertebrates, there is no mistake that the grand prize is the human brain. The human brain is a special brain in numerous regards, but perhaps none more so than in its capacity for socially interactive decision-making. Accordingly, for neuroscientists interested in the human brain, the study of social decision-making offers singular leverage on “the hard problem.” Quite serendipitously, social decision-making is the fundamental province of behavioral economics.

The similarities do not stop there. Like behavioral economics, neuroscience also makes regular use of laboratory controlled experiments using both human and non-human primates. Experiments frequently involve eliciting specific behaviors or activities on the part of the participant, whilst employing various invasive and non-invasive technologies to record physical processes taking place in the brain. Incorporation of the techniques of experimental economics, i.e. social exchange games, was primarily limited by the know-how required to conduct and interpret them. Their reward is a new window on the human brain, and in return for their cooperation economists acquire a physical quantity representing their holy grail of metrics, utility.

On religion and the last liberals.

Note: This is a short paper I wrote last year. Parts of it may be wrong, but I thought it would still serve as a conversation starter. I hope you will find it provocative. I must repeat my standard disclaimer: Just because I wrote it, or said it, doesn't necessarily mean that I believe it.

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe…”
– H.G. Wells, Outline of History: The Whole Story of Man

Introduction

Using methodological techniques and data forms from the field of behavioral genetics, Alford, Funk, and Hibbing showed compelling evidence that genetics plays an important part in shaping political attitudes and ideologies (Alford et al 2005). Specifically, by comparing the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins, the authors were able to mathematically estimate the shaping influence of genetic versus environmental factors. Of their many interesting findings, I will consider the following in greater detail: 1) Genetic transmission frequently affects clusters, or “packages”, of political attitudes, and 2) Genetics accounts for approximately half (53%) the variance in the “index of political Conservatism”. Motivated to understand the potential consequences of these startling conclusions, I will first explore the concept of group selection as revealed in the Sidanius and Kurzban chapter. Following on, I will consider aspects of political conservatism that suggest a possible role for group selection. In the third section, I will discuss the research of Satoshi Kanazawa, which viewed in the light of Alford et al’s findings may point at some group selective pressures affecting liberals. Finally, I will make some concluding remarks, including a short bit of commentary.
Understanding Group Selection

Sidanius and Kurzban define a “group” is “any set of individuals that have a fitness impact on one another” (p.151). Importantly, a degree of relatedness is not part of this definition. In my mind, the clearest evidence of group selection in nature is symbiotic relationships between species. Group selection within a single species, however, is trickier. Two theories of group selection establish a basis for group selection in humans: multilevel group selection and cultural group selection. According to multilevel group selection theory, nature can be said to select for an entire group if, despite some relative advantage/disadvantages between internal phenotypes, members of all phenotypes are on the whole more successful in passing on their genes than individuals belonging to other groups. As the authors explained, this is not “an alternative to the genic view of ... selection,” but rather is “simply another way of … keeping track of genes’ success by looking at their relative replication rates within and between groups” (p. 152). Regardless how the score is kept, the critical factor is the proportion of genes of one phenotype relative to genes of alternative phenotypes in the total population of the next generation.
Alternatively, group selection can proceed according to the processes of cultural group selection (p.162-3). Boyd and Richardson elegantly articulated three conditions for cultural group selection to occur: 1) groups adopt cultural norms and everyone in the group follows them; 2) by chance, some groups have adopted norms that are on the whole beneficial to the group, whereas other groups have adopted norms that are on the whole detrimental to the group; and 3) there is some conforming process by which individuals in groups are compelled to adopt the norms the group has previously found successful. I say these conditions are elegantly articulated because they each correspond to and preserve the logico-deductive relationship between the three fundamental premises of evolution generally: i.e., variation (1), differential fitness (2), and heritable traits (3). As any logician would insist, if you hold all three of these premises to be true, you must infer evolution. In the cultural case, the first two conditions are clearly acceptable. Regarding the third item, they assert that a “conformist tendency” evolved to carry out this function (p. 163). While I find the arguments and evidence supporting this hypothesis compelling (and will here accept it as true), it is reasonable that others might remain unconvinced. I do not wish to digress too far, but it seems worthwhile to point out that if the existence of genetic basis for such a tendency was conclusively demonstrated, cultural group selection must be inferred and summarily added to the canon of evolutionary theory.
Group Selective and Conservatives

So if there exists a “package” of genes involved in political conservatism, it will be an interesting exercise to consider its characteristics as they pertain to group selection. I shall discuss three specific points that suggest the “group” of individuals possessing the package may enjoy greater reproductive success than groups possessing alternative packages.
Focus on the Family

Political conservatism (excluding libertarianism) has over time demonstrated intense concern over matters related to reproduction. As a group, conservatives tend to be fiercely opposed to policies that introduce individual, arbitrary discretion into reproductive matters. This includes opposition to sex education, which is statistically the most effective means of reducing the number of “unwanted” pregnancies, as well as opposition to birth control, distribution of contraceptives, and abortion. In general, political conservatism is at odds with the women’s liberation movement, and promotes more traditional roles for women as homemakers instead of breadwinners. Religion plays a strong part in maintaining and promoting these norms. In a recent empirical study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Weeden et al concluded that the central function of religious attendance in the United States is to support a high-fertility, monogamous mating strategy (Weeden et al (2008). Specifically, they argue that Christian churches in the U.S. facilitate reproduction by promoting social norms that resolve the differential reproductive challenges faced by males and females. For males, who are by design more preoccupied with paternal assurance, the church produces females who forgo all mating opportunities except those with her husband, to whom she is to give unrestricted sexual access. For females, the church produces men who value their role as a breadwinner and will agree to remain monogamous. In so doing, the high level of paternal assurance makes monogamy a more successful reproductive strategy for males, while the high level of resource security works out well for females.
Flags, fish, and 4x4s: Reinforcing extended kinship

Another common feature of political conservatism with group selective implications is an affinity for symbols of group identity. According to Sidanius and Kurzban, “cultural badges such as social customs, traditions, …styles of dress, haircuts, language, and dialect” may play a role in achieving social conformity (p.163). In so doing, they reinforce notions of “socially defined kinship” and establish a stronger basis for large-scale cooperation. According to Weissner (1998), socially defined kinship was “a critical adaptation of homo sapiens. It permitted the construction of broad social security networks for risk reduction by granting access to human and natural resources lying outside the group. Losses due to fluctuations in natural resources, inability to find mates, conflict, and so on, could then be absorbed by a broader population (p. 163).
Enforcing conformity

As the Alford data suggested, political and social attitudes are only partially inherited. And further, group members may not find themselves drawn to the right set of cultural badges and symbols. For such situations, there appears to be a set of adaptations designed to enforce conformity. Specifically, I refer to punishment mechanisms that achieve the effect of altering the decision calculus of individuals, such that they will chose to conform if nature failed to compel them. For example, in an experimental setting Shinada et al show that punishment behavior is likely to be directed at group members who are found to be noncooperators in a system of social and economic exchanges. Further they show that punishment is more severe for in-group members than out-group members (Shinada et al 2004). This finding compels reflection on the everyday observation, corroborated extensively by academic research, that conservatives tend to favor more severe punishments for violators of social norms. This may take the form of disproportionate support for stricter criminal sentences (i.e., death penalty, mandatory minimums, etc), or in a purely social context increased frequency of “hate” based discrimination and violence (Green 1999, Altemeyer 1988, Feldman 2003). In other research, Kurzban emphasizes the profoundly social nature of punishment, especially in response to perceived violation of social norms, such as morals. In an experimental setting, he showed that people are likely to hand down more severe punishments when there is an audience. This may be interpreted as either a “demonstration of the consequences”, so as to dissuade others from behaving thusly in the future, or because the punisher is afraid his punishment will be insufficiently severe to appease the indignant group (Kurzban 2006). Or it may be both. In either case, these findings illuminate the circumstances of an American church where conformity is frequently achieved through the subtle, socially administered punishments for incorrect behavior, especially via gossip and attacks on individual’s reputation in the community (Weeden et al).
Reluctantly reproducing liberals

The above arguments identify factors which could potentially give a conservative package of genes a competitive advantage vis-à-vis alternative packages. In this section, I will consider some factors affecting a “liberal package”, if indeed there is one.
At the 2009 Northeast Evolutionary Psychology Society annual conference, Satoshi Kanazawa presented his research on the evolution of general intelligence (also published in the Psychological Review, 2004). His research relied on an unusual dataset containing individual level information on a wide-variety of life-style habits and attitudes—along side IQ scores administered when the respondents were children. According to his data, individuals with high IQs were more likely to partake in an astonishingly bizarre variety of activities and attitudes. High IQ individuals were more likely to be smoke, stay up late, commit suicide, or do drugs. Especially important in the context of this paper, high IQ individuals were more likely to be homosexuals, have abortions, forgo opportunities to have children, be celibate, get PhDs, take birth control, choose education and careers over homemaking. Things that high IQ people did less frequently included participating in competitive sports, engage in sexual activity, hunt, socialize, and so on. Based upon his findings, Kazawawa advanced the theory that general intelligence evolved as an adaptation to help individuals resolve “evolutionarily-novel” problems; i.e., general intelligence as domain-specific adaptation for the “limited sphere of evolutionary novelty in the ancestral environment.” This theory was supported in his data. High IQ individuals were more likely to participate in every activity that could not reasonably be related to an adaptive challenge an early human ancestor might have faced. Further, the relationship was monotonic: the higher someone’s IQ, the more likely they were to do something they were not evolved to do. In many cases, obviously, this included things that were detrimental to their chances of reproductive success.
Kanazawa’s result comports with Alford et al’s piece on political genetics, and illuminates potential implications on the notion of “need-for-cognition”. In Alford et al, the authors muse “It has long been known that certain political issues seem ‘hard’ to people and others seem ‘easy,’ … because some issues trigger ‘gut responses’ while others do not” (p. 164). In light of their findings, they suggest that the “easy ‘gut’ issues tend to be those that are more heritable” (p. 164). In other words, they are easy because it is not necessary to deliberate, or it is preempted by impulse. Looking at his data, I would like to extend his analysis on this observation. In a very haphazard mini-experiment, I went down the list of items in (table 1 in Alford), marking with red ink the items that—on my best guess—we likely related to an adaptive problem faced by our primordial ancestors. Alternatively, I marked with green ink items that appeared to only make sense in the modern context, or are evolutionarily novel. As expected, there is a lot more red ink at the top of the list (most inheritable) than at the bottom (least inheritable). The relative intensity of color toward the top comports with Tesser’s finding that attitudes higher in heritability are manifested more quickly and are more resistant to change (Tesser 1993), leading to lower variance. Visually, it looks like a color-gradient that is a deep red at the top and slowly fades to a ruddy green.
In hind sight, I should have used a blue pen for the latter. With the exception of abortion, the list is surprisingly well-ordered (from the bottom to the top) along a left-right ideological dimension. The top of the list is a tight cluster of highly salient, conservative issues beginning with school prayer and property taxes, followed by ‘moral majority’, capitalism, and astrology (mysticism, or religion). From the bottom (left) moving up, we have federal housing, modern art, abortion, divorce, democrats, nuclear power, busing, segregation. Gay rights, as an issue that the left has always been ambivalent about (“don’t ask don’t tell”) is according to this scale a left of center issue, which seems valid.
What this suggests, in sum, is that conservative genes are on average more heritable than liberal ones, if indeed there are any. More likely, liberals are simply the ones who, by chance or because their parents lack them, are not inheriting the genes. This view suggests that the disproportionate “need-for-cognition” observed among liberals may be because they simply lack the “gut” instincts conservatives possess. In other words, they have to think things through because nature gives them no cues. That is not to say they will arrive at better decisions, but the arbitrary nature of the process will inevitably result in higher variance in attitudes among liberals than conservatives.
As measured IQ tends to be higher among liberals than conservatives, these conclusions are consistent with Kanazawa’s theory that general intelligence evolved to allow individuals to resolve evolutionarily novel challenges—and perhaps there may be a relationship. This question, however, will have to wait until another day.
Conclusions

From this analysis, I conclude that the “political conservatism package” of genes likely enjoys a significant adaptive advantage over alternative packages. Not only are conservative traits more heritable than alternatives, they appear to be doing a better job driving the reproductive success of their hosts. With modern birth control and pregnancy-termination methods, liberals are imperiled with a need-to-cogitate over evolutionarily novel problems that are bound to result in maladaptive decisions. Indeed, the outlook for homo literaticus looks grim.
Yet there is cause for hope. Evolution is a very slow process, and other dynamics may be in play elsewhere in the world. For example, this is all likely irrelevant in China which has for more than a generation instituted a 1-child policy. But furthermore, Alford et al’s findings estimate that the conservative package of genes is only 53% heritable. That gives us 47% to work with.
To make the most of this, we should begin to think in terms of public policy goals. Goals should include making sex education mandatory and outside the control of local school districts that may oppose it. Education in general should place greater emphasis on critical reasoning skills that properly equip young people to deal with fallacious arguments. In terms of social policy, we should enact policies ameliorate the circumstances that force women to choose between careers and maternity. For example, providing high-quality, publically funded childcare for as long as needed.
But why should we act? As a result of some statistical fluke, a small piece of the universe woke up from eternal slumber to briefly ponder its own existence. This is us. Beingness is something evolution can’t have accounted for. Once we discovered it, we compromised the system—like a test subject who amidst an experiment realizes what is going on. For a brief moment, our destiny is our own. We have existential freedom. As far as we know, we are the only beings in the universe to have ever done this. Let this not be a blink of an eye and a return to non-beingness, but the start of something greater.


Works Cited

Alford, John R., Carolyn L. Funk., and John R. Hibbing. 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review 99: 153-67.
Handbook, Chapter 5. Sidanius and Kurzban.
Shinada Mizuho, Toshio Yamagishi, and Yu Ohmura. “False friends are worse than bitter enemies: “Altruistic” punishment of in-group members”. May 2005.
Kanazawa, Satoshi (2004) General intelligence as a domain-specific adaptation. Psychological review, 111 (2). pp. 512-523.
Kurzban, Robert, Peter DeScioli, Erin O’Brien. “Audience effects on moralistic punishment”. Evolution and Human Behavior. March 2007
Feldman, Stanley. 2003. Enforcing social conformity: A theory of authoritarianism. Political Psychology 24: 41-74.
Altemeyer, Bob. 1988. Chapters 1-3. Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Weedon, Jason, Adam B. Cohen, and Douglas T. Kenrick. “Religious attendance as reproductive support” in Evolution & Human Behavior, September (2008) Vol. 29, No. 5, Pp 327-334