Category: System Guidance

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Evolving consciousness

Living systems are self-organizing; inquiring systems are also self-critical. All are texts which revise themselves in dialogue with their contexts. Over generations of interpretant symbols, the types of these texts evolve.

Let us inquire into the role of consciousness in this process. Thomas Metzinger begins here:

First, let’s not forget that evolution is driven by chance, does not pursue a goal, and achieved what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems in a blind process of hereditary variation and selection.

— Metzinger 2009, 55

But if evolution has achieved ‘what we now consider the continuous optimization of nervous systems,’ why can’t we say that this was (and is) an intrinsic ‘goal’ of evolution, a final cause, before anyone considered it? Surely a real tendency (or intention) does not need to be consciously chosen in order to guide a process in a general direction. Why not say that a ‘goal’ of evolution is the development of guidance systems, of what Peirce calls self-control? Wouldn’t any real guidance system, no matter how primitive, have a tendency to optimize itself? After all, no process can be driven by ‘chance,’ although chance may contribute to the variation which is necessary in order for selection to operate. Nothing can be driven unless in some direction, and that directedness may itself evolve, from vague tendency to preconscious intention to conscious purpose, from natural selection to ethical inquiry.

Explanations and complications

Being organisms ourselves, we often find it ‘simple’ – that is, easy and ‘natural’ – to interact with other organic entities, especially if they are closely related to us. This kind of ‘simplicity’ is transparent and implicit. But when we try to explain how complex systems work by naming their parts and their functions, the symbols we use often turn out very complicated.

Living systems are organic systems, which means that they are self-organizing and self-guided. But if we describe how any system works, we are making a map of it from outside the system. Such an external and explicit map has its uses in a universe of discourse, but does not work implicitly like the system’s internal map, which has to be a simplified representation of the territory it maps (Chapter 11). When a geographical map is reduced in scale, minute features of the territory disappear.

The more you analyze an organic system, the more precise, detailed and complicated your description becomes. The more methodically (or ‘systematically’) you map the system, the more its subsystems appear as mechanisms. But an external map which makes an organic system look mechanical is of little or no use for guiding your interactions with that system in real time; for that you have to rely on your internal (implicit) mapping. Biologically speaking, dialogue between members of the same organic species amounts to the structural coupling of their internal guidance systems which we call empathy.

Sometimes, though, real-time dialogue and other interactions with other selves turn awry; and sometimes the only way to restore their implicit simplicity is to investigate how they work. Sometimes, as in restoring a living body to health, an expert analysis of its workings can furnish the key to a healing habit-change. Empathy itself may need to step back from immediacy to inquiry in order to heal itself.