Blindsight

I recently downloaded a free novel, Blindsight by Peter Watts. This is a short novel released under the Creative Commons license. The author has a good deal of other material available as well.

Blindsight explores the idea that sentience is not necessarily required for a high degree of intelligence. It suggests that if intelligence is a property of organisms that promotes Darwinian fitness, then intelligence unhindered by the self-absorption of sentience could be superior. Valuable brain power would not be spent contemplating which purse should be today's little dog carrier. Instead it would be directed, mindlessly, toward raw problem solving.

Clearly sentience is not required for life; bacteria and algae are highly successful and robust forms of life with no sentience, no introspective ability whatsoever. Unfortunately they also have no problem solving ability, or even any way to know what a problem is. They can react to their environment, but these reactions are purely 'hard-coded', that is to say, there is minimal or no situational analysis occurring to stimulate a given reaction. A motile organism might, for example, react to the presence of light or food by moving in a particular way, the result being an consumption or fleeing behavior. However, this individual organism does not learn to associate light with food. It cannot perform any pattern analysis to improve it's performance.

A more advanced organism might have more sophisticated input processing. For example snails have sufficient processing power and memory to learn to associate events and to react based on those events. On the presumption that our sentience and consciousness arises as a result of the complexity of our brains, it is reasonable to suppose that sea snails, with their extremely limited quantity of neurons, are not at all sentient, they have no self-awareness at all. However, it has been shown that a sea snail can be taught to associate two unrelated stimuli. This is a very primitive form of intelligence. The snail learns and remembers, and can unlearn as well, dynamically reacting to it's environment, unlike the bacterium, which reacts without learning.

As an aside, I do not mean to imply that neurons, as employed by the sea snail, are the only way an organism can learn. I can imagine that it would be possible for a single-celled organism to develop simple associate learning and memory through chemical means and thereby exhibit primitive intelligence as well. I only mean to contrast two extant organisms, both non-sentient and only one of which has the capacity to learn. If I knew of an example of a learning microbe I would use it.

Sea snails, with their very limited number of neurons, have a fairly limited capacity to learn and react. As the complexity of an organism grows and more neurons with different functions are added greater flexibility and capability are realized. Mice are vastly more complex than snails and clearly have an enormously enhanced ability to learn about the world around them and how to behave in it. They have an amazing capacity to sense the world around them and react appropriately, combining instinctual behaviors with learned behaviors. They can see a crouching cat and compare him to a preprogrammed idea of what a predator looks like. Recognizing a match the mouse must then evaluate his immediate environment and decide whether to freeze or flee. Mice are clearly more intelligent than snails.

Mice are so complex that it is difficult to know for sure if they are devoid of sentience. Obviously they don't have the capacity for self-awareness on par with apes, but it is possible that there is at some level a spark of the introspective capacity. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that they are, like the snails, nothing more than exquisitely complex bio-machines. While we can project upon them our human ideas of awareness, it is quite plausible that they are entirely devoid of self-awareness.

Operating on the assumption that that is true, we can see the behavior of the mouse as golem-like, alive and reacting to stimulus, but with 'nobody home' to marvel at the world or ponder whether she should eat any of her babies.

Stepping further up the ladder of intelligence critters, we could perhaps imagine a being similarly to ourselves in complexity, having developed not only the snails ability to learn and remember and the mouses ability to perform complex pattern recognition and decision making, and even our advanced ability to perform higher cognitive functions such as advanced logic and reasoning, but still devoid of self-awareness. Such a creature might easily recognize and solve the sorts of puzzles we only associate with human intelligence. And yet, again, there wouldn't be any 'being' there, only a cold intelligence, mindlessly solving problems and adapting it's actions only to survive and reproduce.

If you were to introduce such a being into a population of self-aware humans the humans might quickly recognize the unfeeling, sociopathic nature of the creature and seek to eliminate it. As a highly intelligent being our golem might quickly adapt, analyzing the problem and identifying it's failure to blend in as a difference in behavior. It might then observe humans and learn to emulate their social behaviors well enough to stop drawing attention.

A human would see only a creature with human-like affectations and assume it was similarly sentient. But still it would be a mindless machine, just moving and reacting in ways conducive to it's survival and success.

This is an interesting idea I think. We tend to think of ourselves as highly sentient, rational beings. But many of the things we do we do without piping intentions through our upper-most rational consciousness. We drive from work to home lost in thought, while some part of us gets us from one place to another. Many a sober driver has arrived at his destination and been surprised by the lack of awareness of what happened between. Most of us do not constantly narrate our daily lives, running every minute decision through our conscious mind.

At some level we all operate as mindless, but intelligent, beings. With some practice we can silence the constant voice narrating our more complex decisions. In top performing athletes this is a necessary step. Ultimate performance does not come through conscious, real-time analysis, it comes through unconscious action and reaction. Mathematicians and physicists in deep analysis don't walk themselves through each tiny bit of a problem, they let their intelligence do it and the little voice in their heads just takes credit for it once the heavy lifting is done.

So why is it that we so exalt our consciousness? It doesn't contribute to our intelligence, often it won't even just shut the hell up so we can go to sleep. It takes all the credit for what we do when often it isn't even involved. About the only thing it seems to be good for is appreciating things (including, notably, itself). It is the self-appointed giver of purpose, the thing that both makes purpose necessary and assigns purpose. A self-referential question in our minds that is it's own answer.