Investigation into Consciousness

Consciousness: A Bio-philosophical Investigation A philosophical and neurophysiological investigation. Being a study of the neurophysiology and evolution of consciousness through the Animal Kingdom, with special consideration applied to human consciousness. John Dale Consciousness: A Bio-philosophical Investigation © Copyright 2012 John Dale All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author. All images have come from the public domain. ISBN -13: 978-1470124540 BY THE SAME AUTHOR Snowshoes & Stethoscopes 1995 Notes from a Sidecar 2005 CONTENTS Introduction iv Chapter I The Beginnings 1 Chapter II From primitive creatures to creatures with neural systems 8 Chapter III The Development of Intelligence in Animals: initial examination 20 Chapter IV Language in Animals 29 Chapter V Emotions in Animals 35 Chapter VI Pain in Animals 43 Chapter VII Some embryology and the development of the human brain 48 i Chapter VIII Division and Function of the parts of the Brain 58 Chapter IX Definitions of Levels of Consciousness and a discussion on Locked-in Syndrome and preliminary philosophical discussion 70 Chapter X Varieties of consciousness, neurological disorders that shed light on a theory of consciousness 80 Chapter XI Mind-v-Consciousness and the "Hard problem" 107 Chapter XII The history of Language and the role of Language in Consciousness 117 Chapter XIII Conclusions and comments on Neurophenomenology, and the "Evolution" of Consciousness 123 Index 130 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank all of the following who have given advice and encouraged me to go ahead and finish the unformed thoughts which I had been mulling over for many years: Professor John Hayes, of Limerick, Eire for giving this amateur, confidence to go ahead and collect these ideas and ignoring the non-academic level of writing. Dr. M O’C Drury (deceased) for assisting me on the path of staying a practicing Family Doctor but not ignoring the desire to do philosophy. Diana, who has patiently permitted me to write three books now. iii Introduction (Diagram)The general areas of the human brain. Defining the problems. Here we have this wondrous and mysterious brain. But what is the exact relationship of consciousness to the brain? Furthermore what do we really know about consciousness and the role it has played in the evolution of humans? Did consciousness suddenly appear in humans with no evidence of its appearance in animals other than humans? Or did a God suddenly decide to create one species as conscious over all others? What we commonly call consciousness is a complex word and we sometimes use it in ways (usually religious or philosophical) that contain a theory and exclude any further scientific or philosophical examination. If we are restricted to humans from the outset then this book is probably superfluous. If we allow that it may mean a gradation of consciousness, or even self-awareness, that may be present in the “lower” animals, then we can begin to look for something. In philosophy it is sometimes considered that there is a “Hard” problem of the ultimate subjectivity of self-awareness. iv The "Easy Problem" would be the more superficial aspects of the day-to-day functioning of an alert human being. These involve dealing with sensory input, interpretation of basic information and certain other primary roles of consciousness. However, as we will see later, this may be an artificial distinction. This thing called “Consciousness”! What does it have to do with the brain? How did it evolve? Has it evolved? I do not want to imply in any way that this book is anything but an attempt to bring philosophy a little closer to scientific neurophysiology and that philosophy has a role to play in developing knowledge of consciousness. "Consciousness" should be primarily a neurophysiological concept, not only a philosophical concept. By making it magically complex, from the time of Descartes on, we have hampered research into this subject. I would add that this same consciousness changes throughout the day, in sickness and in health, in response to moods or concentration and is most certainly not fixed. It may be altered in meditation. Now it is, of course, quite possible that the very notion is a pure linguistic delusion and that we are not experiencing anything different from an animal looking at the sunset, but we seem to have more. This “more” seems to be what makes us essentially human. But is it? Perhaps we need a little more humility in our approach to the subject and a different scientific or philosophical approach to work around the dilemma presented by objective-v-subjective. This inner experience is undoubtedly important. Some philosophers start off with the distinction between our “higher” consciousness, ability to imagine, ability to discriminate past from future, etc, as leading to a sine qua non that we possess this distinct consciousness. Again some humility might be in order here following an investigation into the whole animal kingdom. I believe it is adding an extra linguistic layer to say we know that anything is a conscious experience, as the simple matter is that we experience it. I see something "red". Then I can answer a question from v someone else "What do you see"? "I am looking at something "red". Am I "conscious" of that? Why would I even need to ask that question? I "feel pain", I don't have to be conscious of "feeling pain". However there are situations where it appears as though someone is in pain but is unable to verify/prove it in any way that we know of, except a certain physical behaviour. And this is enough! Animals surely do the same, not all animals but those of a certain level of organization. It has been stated by philosophical mysterians that we will have to evolve more, to comprehend this mystery; our brains are too limited at present. Perhaps! We are going to examine the possibility that this awareness is an emergent property of the brain. There may be a need to apply laws to the complete concept that may not apply to individual components. This may happen in the same way that a crowd is not completely reduced, in its behaviour, to that of an individual, or that a soccer match is a composite of players and rules and follows different behaviour and rules than those of an individual. We may have an entity whose laws are determined by complex adaptive behavioural laws. The notion of an Emergent Property does not entail that a new entity arises out of the neurons in the brain. Only that at a certain level of organization it gives rise to behaviour which may now follow different laws. We will return to this theme later, but in the meantime we need to examine the animal kingdom and look at the evolution of brain and intelligence and indeed the evolution of consciousness itself. We will see if we are yet able to outline a cogent and unified theory of consciousness based on evolution, embryology, other animals, neurology of humans, and, to a lesser extent, philosophy. Abstract concepts by their very nature, may have different ways of behaving than the usual laws of physics. Yet if we make scientific predictions from them then we need to return to some sense of empirical verification. This is not denying the need to appreciate that the laws of physics apply throughout, at a reductionist level, but laws applying to an individual may not apply to a set. The behaviour of a herd of elephants is quite different and studied differently than the behaviour vi of one elephant. Different laws may apply but the laws of physics stand unchallenged. I will try to paint, illustrate, prove in a certain way, that consciousness is an emergent physical property. It is associated with a certain level of complexity of the brain as a whole. It is also dependent on a pretty normal functioning of a myriad of component parts and mechanisms, many of which I will illustrate. We will be doing anthropological philosophy and neurophilosophy in order to get at our subject. Furthermore we will be painting a picture, illustrating, not attempting to prove outright, any thesis. We are perhaps bypassing the problem, rather than solving a problem which we might feel is overrated. Rather we will hope to offer a working supposition on the nature of consciousness with the basic assumption that it is a naturally occurring phenomenon, which has given Homo Sapiens some advantages. However it may be that in the long run, our development of consciousness contains our downfall. We may be guilty of dissociating ourselves too far from our organic origins and by our very attempts to control our whole environment, we may destroy our species. I prefer to "paint a picture", using words, of consciousness and any theory, because language and science are both deficient in assisting me in saying what I truly might think. That is not meant to be mystical. If the limits of my world are the limits of my language then I am sure language is at fault and needs to be changed to represent more closely the limits of my world, as I see it. I reject the prison imposed on us by the earlier Wittgenstein but even wish to expand on the limits implicit in the later Wittgenstein. The issue of self-referential statements may arise as we talk about self-awareness, and I do not wish to be sidetracked too much by those. The famous paradoxes of logic in the 20th century were viewed as critical, and Frege was totally dismayed by Russell's pointing out the "fatal" flaw in his logical system. But there were ways around the set theory paradox, which Russell and Zermelo had discovered in 1900 and 1901. It is complex, when stated in set theory but basically comes down to the notion of the famous vii "Socrates says all men are liars, is he telling the truth?" The set of all sets which are not members of themselves is harder to fathom but at the basis are self-referential statements or formulae. Russell attempted a solution with his "Theory of Types" but it was weak. However although the discovery lead on to other things it was not anything like as serious as Frege seemed to think, in terms of the massive accomplishment that he and Russell achieved. The point being twofold:-Sometimes there is a methodological solution, and sometimes you can just ignore paradoxes and move on bypassing them. Wittgenstein in the later thirties seemed to downplay paradoxes. Now although we are not dealing with a paradox, more of a dilemma, we are still looking for ways around it, rather than a formal proof/disproof. Our attempt is to take some of the mystery out of "mind", "consciousness" and "self-awareness" and tackle the subject from an empirical viewpoint. There will be some philosophical considerations, but on this subject, I believe, philosophy defers to science. I have used the internet freely, especially Wikipedia but tried not to plagiarize without source recognition. I apologize to the reader, in advance, where he might feel this has already been written and discussed too much already in recent years, but I am writing to try and clarify my own comprehension. If any of it registers with anyone else, then that's nice. If a reference, quote, or diagram, appears to have no source quoted, it will have been used from the internet, with no copyright mentioned. I must apologize to those hoping for more academic references, but this whole book has been written in the relative isolation of Nelson, BC, where the only philosophical library is my own. I am very dependent on the internet for factual research and have found it to be extremely helpful. I also want to avoid the linguistic trap that we have probably inherited from the early onomatopoeic principle that words should sound like the object they represent, or the sound should suggest the meaning. This has survived through to the modern day. I support the ideas of Aristotle that "language is by convention, since no names arise naturally" (De interpretatione 16a 27 ). He went on to say "speech is the representation of viii the experiences of the mind". So we will try to avoid some of the linguistic traps. By avoiding categorical mistakes we hope to avoid ontological mistakes also. So I am in fact saying that the so-called "Hard Problem" may be the wrong question to pose in whatever insoluble form is gets asked. It is possibly similar to asking "what then, created the 'Big Bang?", or "What created Singularity?", and other questions which, stated simply, should not be asked. They are language gone wrong, and thinking gone wrong. Modern philosophy has not necessarily removed itself from science and, like Bertrand Russell, I would like to keep the two subjects very close, but with better appreciation of the notions of certainty and causality and proof, and this is where philosophy is still needed. There are modern thinkers, usually scientists who think that, after Kant, no philosophers have enabled science to proceed forwards. I cannot disagree more with this position and hope to shed light on that as we proceed. So I present a Unified Theory of Consciousness (UTC) and also contend that the "Hard Problem" of consciousness need not be hard. Furthermore I want, again to completely remove any traces of dualism from our thinking. I want to say that the "Hard Problem" simply introduces a form of linguistically induced dualism, with which we can dispense. I would be also saying that there are quite feasible ways to have an idea what it is like to be a bat, if indeed I can have any idea what it is like to feel the "same" as another human being. Consciousness is not localized in any one place and although I point out critical anatomical levels in the brain that are necessary functional levels for consciousness to be in place, it is my opinion that consciousness is a function of the living animal and not to be localized, even specifically in the brain. Most of the critical components are, indeed, in the brain but that is a different matter. For eons we have been trying to localize minds and souls in pineal glands, or wherever, but with a UTC we dispense with that and hope to progress to further research on particular substrates of consciousness. I cannot apologize for the mixture of English and American spelling as I use both all the time. ix To begin our story, we really need to look at the very origins of life on this planet and indeed the origin of the universe. We may as well start at the beginning. John Dale, Nelson, British Columbia, April 2012 x Chapter I The Beginnings. So here we are at one of the greatest mysteries of science, the "Big Bang" itself and Singularity. Matter suddenly formed from pure energy. We really cannot ask the question as to any origin of the energy itself. We can leave atheists and theists to argue over that one indefinitely. If the Big Bang was just over 14 billion years ago, the universe took a while to form elements and compounds and our own planet. Life began with chemotrophs at some time after 4.6 billion years ago (BYA). These organic compounds, some of which remain near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floors, used inorganic material such as hydrogen sulphide to create organic molecules. 1 What happened next remains hypothetical, but it would appear that collections of RNA (ribonucleic acid) became organized through temperature and chemical changes, into prebionts. This may have taken 500 million years. These were non-living substances, almost creatures, and gradually the prebionts organized into organic molecules capable of absorbing materials from the surrounding water into their structure. These macromolecules are known now as coacervates and they in turn evolved into structures with double membranes, which could now grow and form buds. They could perhaps form nucleic acids and such polypeptides as ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate,) which is still critical in our own structure, as illustrated by the famous Krebs cycle we had to learn in organic chemistry. Our murky ancestors were anaerobes and liked high temperatures (very high) and lots of sulphur, so maybe that’s why we still love those stinky hot springs. Over a great length of time came the prokaryotes, such as primitive bacteria. They have no nucleus and very little internal structure. Eventually these specialized into eukaryotes. These highly advanced beings had cells and a certain amount of internal (membrane-adherent) structure. The first fossils were probably prokaryotes and were bacterial fossils, somewhat similar to the modern cyanobacteria. This genus resulted in stromatolites. These appear to be a colonizing version of the cyanobacteria. They formed primitive coral reefs and dominated the earth (insofar as life dominated anything at that time) for 2 billion years. We don’t know much about what happened for a billion years or so but some worm-like animal fossils have been found dating back about 1 billion years ago. So multi-cellular life-forms, began at least that far back. But we need to take a look at the protists to consider before advancing to multi-cellular organisms. Protists are predominantly unicellular, i.e. consist of one cell, and have characteristics of both plants and animals. They live by photosynthesis and can move around under their own power. Familiar modern versions include seaweed, amoebae and slime molds. It is thought 2 that this line of development gave rise to the three main divisions of life i.e. plants, animals and fungi, about 600 MYA. Most protists have one nucleus but some have up to 10,000 nuclei in one cell. In size these creatures vary from 0.01 mm, a green alga, to 65 metres in such forms as a giant kelp. Are we reaching any form of intelligence yet? Slow down! Some protists are capable of moving but they did not seem smart enough to invent sexual recombination and mostly (with some exceptions, it is thought) simply reproduced asexually, i.e. without DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) merging. But we do have to introduce the notion of purposeful behavior at some early point in the life forms and make some distinctions between intentional behavior and thoughtful behavior, so that we do not need to think of heliotropes (i.e. sun-seeking plants) as intelligent. The protists evolved in several pathways. Protozoans, sponges, coelenterates, and protophytes, all evolved from protists. On the plant side protophytes branched off to form all plant life, including seaweed. Protists also gave rise to all invertebrates and vertebrates. 3 I am, of course, taking Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as the most sensible explanation for the current species known in the world. All current life involves combinations of 20 amino acids and utilizes DNA and RNA. RNA, in all probability was the precursor of DNA and gave rise to protein synthesis. We take natural selection to be involved and will not enter into whether this is only at the gene level or whether at the species level, or perhaps a mixture of both. Neither will we deny that natural selection is the only force in nature which produced evolution of species. For instance, natural disasters do not necessarily favour the “strongest” but may be completely bad or good luck to a species. When it comes to human consciousness I will propose a more complex form of evolution, involving bio-social and historical forms. For example, my being influenced by Aristotle some 2300 years later. According to Stephen Jay Gould life does not evolve in any straight sensible pattern but rather in episodes of success and failure. The early species, Ediacaran, were multi-cellular and appeared 600 MYA and died out. Gould has always emphasized that life is not necessarily progressive from early multi-cellular organisms to invertebrates (animals without backbones) through to vertebrates and humans. Vertebrates came through the line of marine vertebrates and then reptiles and mammals followed with the evolution of the neural structure, and onto humans. Yet we are by no means even close to a comparison of success when compared to bacteria, so if we could imagine these highly intelligent bacteria designing all future complex life forms, simply to provide a means to propagate bacteria around the world, we can see how a different look at life might lead us. Our assumption of superiority may be based on transitory success. We want to explore the development of neural systems and intelligent response to the environment. We will also be looking at the development of emotions and the whole notion of consciousness. Of course we are not simply talking about conscious-v-unconscious in the primitive sense but the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, in terms of self-awareness, which we appear to possess. This is not only a function of language 4 presumably, unless we see it as simply a delusion formed as a byproduct of language. We will certainly return to the philosophical issues of consciousness later. We will also need, perhaps, to distinguish “phenomenal” consciousness (pain and recognition of sensory input) from “access” consciousness (information processing with decision making). To return to our evolution examination, according to Gould: “Only one member of our chordate phylum, the genus Pikaia, has been found among these earliest fossils. This small and simple swimming creature, showing its allegiance to us by possessing a notochord, or dorsal stiffening rod, is among the rarest fossils of the Burgess Shale, our best preserved Cambrian fauna”. (Found not too far from where I live at present). (Diagram: Pikaia) So we had a slim chance of survival but, for probably precarious and serendipitous reasons, vertebrate mammals did evolve and survive. The impact of a cosmic body that effectively put an end to dinosaurs, 65 MYA, further increased our chances of survival. As Gould goes on to say, the actual evolution of a certain upright primate in a dry African savanna, between 2-4 MYA was tenuous and we ourselves could have ended up as a gorilla-like being with no further major advance. 5 This of course assumes that you see humans as an advance. There is the possibility that our form of intelligence and specifically the development of language, emotion and consciousness may in fact be our downfall as a species. Let us not forget how successful the lowly bacteria are. But we will return to that happy thought later. Gould himself has pointed out our bias in assuming some superiority and taking our complexity as necessarily “better”. Now let us return to the examination of the progression of early fauna. We will briefly examine the timelines of evolution and then go back to primitive creatures to look at the evolution of “intelligence” and neural systems and see if we can determine the origins of consciousness and which animals we take to be called conscious. Initially we stayed with unicellular creatures for a long time, in the billions of years. Then around 600 MYA the multi-cellular creatures evolved. Then, in the course of less than 200 million years most of the significant changes in organization of multi-cellular primitives took place, i.e. the significant multi-cellular patterns. In the aforementioned Burgess Shale collection, containing specimens found in the Canadian Rockies, we find around the Cambrian geological period that many new species evolved seemingly over 5 million years, or longer according to some sources. The so-called Cambrian explosion, during which the majority of all future species evolved in one form or another, represents rather a similar pattern to the explosion of culture seen in the phenomenally short period of the Athens heyday. We do not yet understand fully the reasons for either. In the last 400 million years we have just further developed those patterns established during that relatively short explosion of species. Mass extinctions, such as that of the dinosaurs, which probably relates to the asteroid, 7-10 Kms in diameter, which impacted at the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, about 65 MYA, may have played more of a role than we probably know. This one impact led to the Cretaceous-Tertiary period of evolution, possibly through a massive dust cloud, which may have blocked light for several months and led to millions of deaths, including whole 6 species. Dinosaurs were but one. Birds seemingly only evolved after this, possibly from certain dinosaurs. Sinosauropteryx prima appeared maybe around 130 million years ago. The Velociraptor is more recent, dating perhaps around 80 million years ago. It was primarily a ground-dwelling dinosaur. These two were perhaps precursors of birds. Recent studies indicate the connection to the modern wild turkey, mainly in terms of bone structure. By 500 MYA the first reptiles had evolved. They were eel-like animals with no eyes. By about 450 MYA the first insects on land had evolved to join some rooted plants. Life had crawled out of the ocean. A mere 50 million years later, reptiles emerged with skulls. The brain began to be protected. At 220 MYA mammals came into being, mostly smaller ones looking like rats. These animals, being warm-blooded, needed to eat more but still laid eggs like reptiles. Primates probably pre-dated the “non-nuclear winter” of the Yucatan asteroid 65 MYA but humanoid creatures began walking upright about 6 MYA. This would have been at the time of the divergence between early hominids and proto-chimpanzees. Modern humans have a heritage of a mere 200,000 years. Around 10,000 years ago we see the first villages, or cities in the fertile valleys of the old Middle-East. But we have jumped ahead, once again and need to return to earlier animals. We have briefly discussed evolution but we need to look at primitive animals in terms of their development of complex behaviour. 7 Chapter II From primitive creatures to creatures with neural systems. We have to start an investigation somewhere and we want to keep in mind that we are trying to see where consciousness came into evolution and even more complex how self-awareness may have arisen. But we need to start at humble beginnings. So let us go to some more primitive creatures. We have mentioned bacteria as the most successful historical evolutionary creatures. They are ubiquitous in soil and water. They are generally very small, but can be found up to 0.5 mms in size. They have no cell nucleus, nor mitochondria (kind of power centres), nor chloroplasts (another energy converter). The renowned amoeba is also unicellular. These are protozoa’s with movement caused by internal cytoplasmic flow. Slime moulds fall into this category, and the amoebas have a pseudopod and can vary in size up to a few millimetres. The amoeba is divided into an endoplasm and ectoplasm, the outer clear layer being the ectoplasm. It eats by phagocytosis, i.e. by surrounding food particles and sealing them into vacuoles and digesting at leisure. They don’t seem to have to work too hard to earn a living. They are more comparable to the civil servants in this respect. Do they have intelligence yet? Hard to say! I refer of course to the amoeba. Maze solving for food is within the capability of the amoeba. 8 (Diagram: single-celled amoeba) Following Protozoa’s we move to worms, insects, fish, amphibia, birds and mammals. The new name for the last four is chordata due to some kind of backbone but for our purposes the earlier classification is better. What we want to do is look at some more primitive forms individually, rather than discuss the apparent reasons for evolutionary success. Such things as colonial organization, sexual reproduction, exo- and endo-skeletal development we will pass by at this time. We will look at worms. There are four main groups of worms: Flatworms or Platyhelminthes, Ribbon worms or Nemertea, Roundworms or Nematoda and segmented worms, or Annelida. Platyhelminthes are the simplest animals that are bilaterally symmetrical. They are triploblastic i.e. composed of three fundamental cell layers. Flatworms have no body cavity except a gut (and some may even lack that) and have no anus. The same 9 pharyngeal opening both takes in food and expels waste. Due to a lack of any other body cavity, in larger flatworms the gut is often very highly convoluted so as to transport food to all parts of the body. They must respire by diffusion, thus cells cannot be far from the outside, which is why they are flat. (Diagram: Flatworm) One of the flatworms, Notoplana Acticola has been well studied, and its brain examined, as it does have one. There is a diversity of cell types and some spines almost resembling the dendrites (“legs”) that we have on our neurons. It may have 2000 neurons and can orient, move, locate food and avoid predators. We can perhaps call this an early form of intelligence. Some flatworms are free living, like planaria, and others are parasites, like the human lung fluke. This one causes a most annoying disease in its host. 10 (Diagram: Lung Fluke) The next category is Ribbon Worms and they would be interesting to those that like to study them. I don’t, so we will pass them by and look at Nematodes. These are actually the most numerous multi-cellular animals on earth. They have perhaps 20,000 species and are divided into parasitic freeliving. Nematodes have neural systems; very primitive but they do have something like a brain! Now many humans assume that only humans can be conscious, or rather possess consciousness in the superior awareness context. I am not at all sure about this. It is most presumptuous. I once asked my dog “Lady” if she was conscious but being fast asleep she could not answer me. She was also stone-deaf by this time, and so did not hear the question. But I am sure she would answer in the affirmative. Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we wouldn't know what it was talking about anyway, but I am sure if Lady could speak she would make herself totally intelligible to me. I am also quite sure that if a lion could speak, Wittgenstein would have been listening very carefully, had he been close enough to hear the lion. Back to the nematodes; they do have about 1000 somatic cells and over a hundred reproductive cells. They are unsegmented and lack appendages but are useful as biological insecticides. To say the roundworms have brains is perhaps misleading. They are low on 11 the bureaucratic order of intelligence but do possess a ventral and dorsal nerve and primitive sense organs. They are starting to interpret and react to their environment. It becomes a fine line as to when reaction becomes "thoughtful" but we will look at that later. (Diagram: The Nematode) They do have an anus, such a big advance! The nematodes are plant killers, in addition to their insecticide utility. Damage from worms may cost $100 Billion US per year worldwide, it is thought. The last species of worms, segmented worms, like the ubiquitous earthworm do not represent a significant intelligence leap and we will crawl on by them. 12 Subdivisions of animal brains:The organization of brains in the animal kingdom can best be looked at by the following levels: • Molecular Level – basic avoidance or chemical response. • Cellular level – Neurons, which are the basic signaling cells and most basic elements of the nervous system • Network Level – Neurons now organize into networks and process singly or in parallel. • Behavioural level – Neural information processing now results in a certain behaviour of the whole animal The insect brain seemed to evolve directly from the earthworm brain design. In the annelid worms or segmented worms, each segment had its own little brain or ganglia. These were interconnected, segment by segment. The insect’s head is actually segmented but now has fused these segments into a brain with optic lobes, ocelli (which are accessory eyes capable of perceiving the intensity of light), olfactory lobes or antennal lobes. In addition they have mushroom bodies which are the closest equivalent of a higher “problem solving” centre. There are neurosecretory cells which equate to a primitive hypothalamus in humans and corpora cardiaca and allata, which produce a hormone. The last bit of the structure is a subesophageal ganglion which coordinates the mouthparts while feeding. 13 (Diagram: The Insect Brain) The insect brain appears limited to fairly rapid adaptive use but with some Pavlovian learning by experience. It does not appear able, as we shall see mammals are, to create and imagine virtual realities and thus to anticipate new dangers. We assume some kind of memory. Interestingly the "Mushroom Bodies" may be the closest counterpart in an invertebrate to the cerebral cortex. The insect brain is generally divided into four sections, optical lobes, protocerebrum, deutocerebrum and the tritocerebrum. The mushroom bodies are in the protocerebrum but although given the title, implying higher centre, they are more to do with smell than anything else. However we should be warned not to underestimate the immense importance of smell in conveying information to animals. The protocerebrum is also secondary to the antennal or olfactory lobes, in the deuterocerebrum, which in addition analyses touch. We are not by any means implying consciousness at this level in the animal kingdom, but we are perhaps starting to see the underlying structure necessary for it to develop. 14 We now need to take a look at fish. Fish and certain early vertebrates appeared in the Cambrian Period (510 MYA) and gave rise to modern species only about 400 MYA. Interestingly the early forms, from fossil knowledge, appeared to be in fresh water and the earliest modern fossil forms of bony fish appeared about 250 MYA. Fish have developed brains and have leapt well beyond a few basic nerve cells and can sense toxic substances for navigation adaptation. The development of three areas of the fish brain, appear to relate to the ability to navigate in complex environments. The telencephalon, cerebellum and optic tectum are three areas more highly developed to enhance spatial orientation in a visual environment, i.e. light area of the ocean. The significant findings in this more complex brain are the ability to interpret multiple and parallel inputs, integrate the information and act on the resulting conglomerate of information. Research on fish with brain lesions in specific areas, has assisted these conclusions. It has been concluded that the fish brain is not developed enough to feel pain though animal rights activists question this. This is based on the fact that the fish brain is primarily brain stem development, and not cerebral hemispheres as is the human brain. So there may be a reaction that looks like pain but with no cerebration sufficient to "feel" pain. A difficult concept, we shall return at some point to that notion. A fish caught on a hook certainly looks as though it is not very happy! There is an argument that lobsters and crabs cannot feel pain when being boiled, because they have only about 100,000 neurons and we have over 100 billion. I find the argument somewhat lacking and perhaps those who argue it should have all but 100,000 neurons removed, and then undergo boiling in the name of science! 15 (Diagram: Fish Brain) Fish have a large olfactory bulb that is directly connected to the cerebral hemisphere. This means that their higher thinking will be mostly smell driven. They have no hippocampus, so that would lead us to expect that they will not produce feelings of love, compassion, or rage. Fish do however, have a modest cerebral cortex that is close to the occipital cortex, which means that the fish will react to visual cues and create memories from the visual cues. The "cerebral cortex", or telencephalon, of the fish is more concerned with olfactory information than anything else. Fish may well have a long term memory. It is well known in medicine that when a patient is reduced to brain stem level of unconsciousness, the patient does not feel pain. There may be a primitive level of stimulus avoidance but that is different than pain as a remembered entity. Fish may fall into the category of sensing pain but not knowing they are in pain. This is somewhat similar to the situation of certain anaesthetics we use on humans. The patients appear to react to painful stimulus but there will be no memory of any pain when the patient "wakes up". There are philosophical overtones, as mentioned previously, and we may return to this subject as part of consciousness later. It has been said that because fish lack a neocortex they could not possibly be conscious in any similar manner to humans and therefore would not feel pain. An eminent animal expert, Temple Grandin, stated that she believes fish could have 16 consciousness without a neocortex because "different species can use different brain structures and systems to handle the same functions." Grandin, Temple; Johnson, Catherine (2005). Animals in Translation. New York, New York: Scribner. pp. 183–184. There are many claims that fish can distinguish colours and be taught to feed out of their owners hands, when pets. However we shall take fish in general to be lacking somewhat in abstract thought and symbolic powers. Fish, reptiles and amphibians have a six-layered allocortex, which is the outer layer of their brain. More complex brains are seen in all of the following groups: arthropods (insects and crustaceans), cephalopods (octopi, squids and certain mollusks), and vertebrates. Vertebrates or craniates began to have the brain protected inside a skull and then increased the surface layer of the brain by convolutions. The folds of the brain are called gyri. I show that below but we are not ready to analyze it yet. This just illustrates nature's ingenuity in increasing cortex but not overall size. (Diagram) The Human Brain showing Sulci and Gyri We mentioned that a flatworm might have 2000 neurons. In the human being, during early development, the brain increases by 250,000 neurons per minute. The majority of the brain cells are in place by birth but the brain increases in size for several years and increases the glial cells, 17 which are an evolutionary advance seen earlier in the phylogenetic tree. The brain also adds many more connections after birth. The glial cells assist in insulating neurons with myelin. The myelin sheath enables conductivity at up to 100 times faster than a non-myelinized sheath. This was a dramatic evolutionary leap. (Diagram: The neuron showing the myelin sheath) In humans we are familiar with the demyelination diseases and how this affects us cognitively. The human brain ends up with between 10 billion and 100 billion neurons with each one being linked to perhaps 10,000 neurons. This is a large computer! 18 Just as in certain worms, which develop ventral and dorsal neural tubes the human brain develops from a neural tube. The front part becomes the brain proper and the rest becomes the spinal chord. In the front part of the human embryo develops the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. We are not quite ready yet, in this investigation, to dive into a more detailed look at the human brain, as we want to examine further the development of intelligence in other animals. 19 Chapter III The Development of Intelligence in Animals: initial examination. Before we look at the complexities of humans and the human brain function, let us focus on animals in general, and introduce birds. How can we judge intelligence and emotions in animals? I take it for granted that the development of emotions is every bit as important as "intelligence", and is in fact a form of intelligence anyway. There are many recent books on “Emotional Intelligence” and the phrase has become acceptable as a more extended way of looking at intelligence in general. We can break down the behaviour according to a system modified from Wikipedia online: • Attention: Picking out one useful item amongst the sensory fields. Pigeons can find grain in the middle of substrate. • Categorisation: Discrimination e.g. birds can discriminate between differing human speech sounds • Memory: Certain animals exhibit similar short-term memory to humans e.g. monkeys and spatial memory is very well developed in e.g. squirrels, who need to remember where all their hoards of nuts are stored. Perhaps the Arctic Tern and navigation memory would be applicable here also. The tern can navigate from polar areas to the opposite polar region. I remember seeing them in spring in Cambridge Bay, NWT (as it was then) and marveling at the distance they had come. • Tool use: Although finches have been observed to use tools, it does not compare to the use of tools by baboons, observed by Jane Goodall. Sea Otters are known to use tools also. They have been noted to tuck tools under their armpits to use when diving for food. • Reasoning and problem solving: Chimpanzees appear to have fairly good reasoning in problem solving. My dog “Sadie” has excellent reasoning in this faculty having successively weakened our resistance 20 to end up sleeping in the bed with us. This was her plan all along, only it was not evident to us at the beginning. • Language: This has often been researched by spurious methods of trying to teach animals to speak, instead of studying advanced communications in a non-verbal sense. The dance of the bees is one example of complex language. • Consciousness: This would include the ability to self-refer. Perhaps a delusion of humans also. Maybe some aliens would find our belief that we possess self-awareness very strange and would want proof. But if we mark an animal’s skin, while asleep or sedated, and then let it see itself in a mirror we can see a response from some animals. If they try to remove the mark after seeing it in the mirror then that might be interpreted as a form of self-awareness. Chimps who first look into a mirror, act as though they were encountering another chimp, but they soon begin to perform simple repetitive movements like swaying from side to side while watching their images. Perhaps they are learning that they can control the movement of the `other' chimp. They then appear to grasp the equivalence between the mirror image and themselves and start to explore body parts such as the genitalia, which they can't ordinarily see. If a spot of dye that can't be smelled or felt is placed on a chimp's eyebrow ridge during anesthesia, it will be noticed when the animal first encounters a mirror after waking. More telling, the chimp will touch the dyed area and then smell and look at the fingers that have contacted the mark, suggesting self recognition - a sense of self. We can probably assume they do not have a theory of other minds, yet some humility may be in order here. Of some cats we have had, Shoebrain did not like his own mirror image but Wagstaff, seems quite enamoured of herself in the mirror. Snowflake ignores mirrors with disdain. Animals that have been known to recognize "self" in mirrors include great apes, pigeons, elephants, and certain dolphins. • Empathy and emotions: This will require a whole chapter, for instance the behaviour of killer whales, if one of their own is 21 slaughtered, can hardly be called a lower animal instinct. So grief for separation or death is a relevant topic here. See later for an account of crows paying tribute to the death of one of their own. • Playing: This is an often overlooked area but one which displays a certain relation to our consciousness and needs examining. We shall examine it later. We should not really look at animal intelligence from an anthropocentric viewpoint. We may be able to answer certain questions as to “how” and “why” and even “when” a little better than the standard “who”, “where” and “what” which other animals can do, but we just have a specialized system of communication unused by other animals, i.e. symbolic expression; specifically verbal. Later on, I will introduce the notion of "emic" and "etic" studies in biology. That is to say, studying from "inside" versus "outside" your subject domain. Windsor Chorlton, in an online article from the United Kingdom, documents some wonderful examples of animal intelligence. Hob, a falcon used by police, is able to recognize his owner’s Lada car. Once when lost the bird spotted the car on the A 303 amidst traffic and followed it to his turnoff point. On another occasion when chasing a pheasant the falcon emerged from the hedge sounding frustrated and continued to bug the owner until he followed it into the hedgerow, where after some distance he again found the bird standing over a rabbit hole where the pheasant was hiding. This would appear to be innovative problem solving. “Among birds, crows have especially large forebrains and display impressive resourcefulness Faced with the problem of how to transport scattered biscuits, ravens, unlike other birds, don't carry them off one-by- one. They stack them into one neat pile, and then carry them all off. The woodpecker finch of the Galapagos Islands uses a cactus spine to prise insects out of crevices, while the Egyptian vulture smashes open ostrich eggs with stone.” (Windsor Chorlton) With further regard to tool use Chorlton records the following: “In what is now Ghana, colonial forestry official W B Collins witnessed the extraordinary way in which driver ants harnessed a simple tool to break 22 through the defenses of a horde of snails. Driver ants can reduce a python to bones in an hour, but these snails initially repelled the ant army by secreting a foam-like mucus into the entrances of their shells for protection. The ants deposited crumbs of dry soil in the mucus. As the liquid was absorbed, the snails responded by secreting yet more mucus, and in turn, the ants deposited more soil around the snails. This relentless attack technique was repeated until the snails had exhausted their mucus reserves and lay defenseless.” The more we look at animal intelligence the more we can probably conclude that we differ in degree not kind. Thomas Grandin (Department of Animal Science, Colorado State University) in his online essay “Consciousness in Animals and People with Autism” October 1998, discusses the adaptive intelligence of mice: “In a classic experiment, blind mice were trained to run a maze almost without error. This required that the mice make correct turns at about twenty junctions in the maze. The maze was cleaned after each trial to remove olfactory cues and the orientation of the maze was rotated to prevent sound orientation from the laboratory. Temporary regressions were produced after new orientations of the maze, however the mice soon overcame this and were performing with hardly any mistakes at all. After three months, the mice were successfully trained to the maze and four different variations of the maze were introduced. In the first, the size of the maze was enlarged, in the second the angles of the turns were skewed from 90 degree turns to 45 and 135 degree turns, the third was a reverse of the second and the mouse had to turn through 134 and 45 degree turns and the fourth was a mirror image of the original maze. Before long, the mice had successfully mastered all the different mazes. The success of the experiment proved that the mice had transformed the information learned from the first maze which the mice then used to solve the problems of the novel mazes.” There is then the question of need in various animals. We may have developed the cortex because our environment required more adaptive and abstract thinking to problem solve food supply etc. Another species may have developed a visual brain and do its thinking primarily visually, just as 23 we will see Thomas Grandin states that that is the way he thinks, due to his autism. Another animal may have primarily an auditory brain and think in sounds or, again, yet another may have simply a massive olfactory brain and think in smells. So we should have some humility in thinking we are necessarily more intelligent than certain animals, just different. Our own intelligence manifests itself in different ways. Grandin describes the levels of consciousness as being four in total: 1. Consciousness within one sense 2. Consciousness where all the sensory systems are integrated. 3. Consciousness where all the sensory systems are integrated with emotions. 4. Consciousness where sensory systems and emotions are integrated and thoughts are in symbolic language. He goes on to add that he is at level two because he does not connect thoughts with emotions. Grandin has difficulty with abstract ideas and has to imagine them as concrete examples, for example he defines "belief" as "things where there is a high probability that something may be true, but I am not 100% sure". Michael Gazzaniga, in an online article written 25 years after his main work on Split Brain Theory, notes the intriguing finding that mice can do better than humans on some tests: “Illusory contours reveal that the human right brain can process some things the left cannot. Both hemispheres can "see" whether the illusory rectangles of this experiment are fat or thin. But when outlines are added, only the right brain can still tell the difference. In mice, however, both hemispheres can consistently perceive these differences. For a rodent to perform better than we do suggests that some capabilities were lost from one hemisphere or the other, as the human brain evolved. New capabilities may have squeezed out old ones in a race for space.” As humans developed speech primarily in the left hemisphere, which is why speech is generally 24 lost more when the right side of the body is affected by a stroke, it may have been at the expense of another important function or perceptual skill. On the Television program “Daily Planet” there was, recently, an item about rats being used in Africa to detect land mines. After suitable training they could sniff out the TNT used and return for a banana, while the land mine was destroyed, or deactivated. They say that rats are easier to train and work with than dogs. Apparently they have not heard of lawyers, who for three reasons make far better research animals: 1: There is no shortage of lawyers and PETA has betrayed no interest in defending them yet. 2: There is only a remote chance of their trainer becoming emotionally attached. 3: There is nothing they will refuse to do for a suitable reward. On the same program, sheep given food laced with antibiotics when sick preferred that to food without the antibiotic, seemingly a double-blinded type of experiment. Would it be intuition or conscious knowledge of feeling better after a certain food? Of interest here is the comparison between a rat brain and a human brain. 25 (Diagram: Human Brain-v- Rat Brain) Also of interest here, we note the main size difference in cerebral cortex and in sulci and gyri. However the limbic system is well developed. We might comment at this time that a mouse or rat has about 85% similarity in genes to humans, a chimpanzee 98%, the famous fruit fly or Drosophila Melanogaster actually shares about 60% of its genes with humans and with the Roundworm 21%. Play in animals as evidence of higher consciousness. Playing in animals almost falls under the same chapter and logic as emotions but let us examine it separately. The pleasure of a cat snuggled up to you is two way and known to release dopamine and opiates. In rats, permitting them to "play" has been shown to extend a healthy life. A Rhesus monkey has been observed in the wild, doing a reverse flip. Rhinos play, 26 even badgers play. More surprising, is that some parrots and other birds have been observed distinctly playing. Generally it is confined to mammals and the longer the maturation to adult, the more playfulness observed. Animal play has been categorized into locomotor play, predatory play, object play, and social play. Locomotor play appears to be simply random exercise of muscle groups, running, jumping etc. Predator play, often seen in our kitties is very common, birds also indulge in this. Object play, whilst related to predator play has a slightly more creative aspect, illustrated by "playing house" in children. Monkeys and Chimpanzees indulge in stick practice and practise fishing termites out of holes to increase manual dexterity. Finally social play involves other animals with games such as tag, or wrestling or even play fighting. There are usually certain gestures performed by animals to indicate that the following is within a play area of rules. Females are more likely to perform grooming or looking after "baby brother". Whilst it is true that human playfulness contains more symbolism and perhaps more imagination, than other mammals, it is surely presumptuous of ourselves, once again, not to appreciate the higher consciousness involved in all play. Donald Griffin in a book entitled "Animal Thinking", Harvard University Press 1984, uses an example I remember well as a child. When milk bottles with aluminum foil caps were delivered daily and left outside houses (as they were in the fifties and sixties anyway) the great tits and some other small birds discovered a good source of rich cream on the top of the milk, by pecking through the cap. We also had a race inside the house to see who could get the most cream on their cereal and then shake the bottle and pretend we had not been greedy. The birds exhibited great adaptive intelligence. Griffin talks of "versatile adaptability of behavior to changing circumstances and challenges", and wants to use that as a criterion of conscious awareness in animals. It might be a good starting point but to encompass the full range of human consciousness we may need more. He goes on to discuss the notion of intentionality in animals and intention movement as itself an indicator of consciousness. The fashionable behaviouristic thinking of that era made it less likely that ethologists would 27 think along those lines. Griffin further points out the use of symbolism in animals as an indicator of higher intelligence/consciousness. The famous dance of the bees is symbolic for information as to whereabouts of food. That these are in some meaningful sense conscious and intentional seems to be a feasible interpretation. Thus philosophers who assume that man's use of symbols is parallel to the higher levels of consciousness and even to the notion of self-awareness, may need to rethink their conclusions. We shall have recourse elsewhere to look at the origins of language and its relationship to consciousness and the development of thought. We need now to examine with what degree of sophistication animals can communicate. 28 Chapter IV Language/Communication in Animals. There will be two parts to the discussion of language, firstly the advanced state of animal "language" and secondly the evolution of language in humans. The latter will be discussed in Chapter XI. Steven Roger Fischer in "A History of Language" Reaktion Books Ltd 1999, discusses the development and evolution of speech and communications in both animals and humans. We shall borrow freely from his very readable book and focus on aspects that illustrate the advanced consciousness of animals. Language will be taken to include discursive (verbal speech) and symbolic. Symbolic can be gestures, transmission of information by use of chemicals (pheromones), or dancing, or pictures. In other words we are looking at all ways in which information can be transmitted. Fischer mentions the importance of the limitation of human audible frequencies. At our best we hear between 30 and 18,000 cycles per second. Many animals can communicate both above and below these levels. I will just mention here that the remainder of this chapter paraphrases from Fischer's informative book. The fact that we cannot understand, yet, the language of fish or frogs does not mean that they do not have one, but the focus is on ants, bees, and "higher" species. Ants use a combination of pheromones and also stridulation, in an ultrasound range. Thus an individual ant can communicate critical (food source) information through certain movements and the above two methods. The honey-bee, made famous by von Frisch, actually uses a combination of the complex dance, a variation of a figure 8 for distance and direction, plus some vibration of the wings and vibration of the thorax. So the other ants use observation, touch and hearing to gain their information. The research on the African Grey parrot has revealed an advanced level of speech. A famous parrot, named Alex, was taught for about 12 years and could name up to 100 objects, could count to six, could name colours. Not only could he name these objects but he could perform various 29 conceptual exercises with them such as request, refuse and quantify the objects. We do not yet know the full extent of complex bird songs but they do operate out of our frequency range in some of their communication. When we move on to mammals we have tended to concentrate on acoustic means, such as used by bats in echo location. This is not necessarily communication. Both bats and mice seem to use other frequencies for actual communication, but we have much research to do still to understand it. It is also known that bats can navigate by reference to magnetic fields and certain experiments have been done to throw off their navigation by use of false magnetic fields. Much research has been undertaken with horses, elephants, whales and dolphins on their communication methods. Both horses and deer use a combination of gesture, orientation, eye contact, and avoidance, in order to communicate and horse trainers have learned this to their advantage. It reminds me of my early communication with Inuit, who do rely less on normal speech (that is not to say the language is not functional and rich). Elephants use rumbles, roars, growls, snorts, trumpets, and barks, some out of the human range. The infrasound rumble between males and females may carry 4 kilometres. Panic calls can carry miles as well. Whales have even more subtle methods of communicating. The frequency they use can be as high as 256,000 Hz, way above humans range. The information transmitted, over long range, can be for sexual attraction, information as to where the pod is and tracking members out of sight. Individual pods have discrete calls and can "talk" eight kilometres away. They use clicks, whistles, and short piercing screams which as pulsed. The pods have unique dialects in their calls and can be identified by their individual nature. The most complex sounds may be from the Blue Whale. The "song" is at 188 decibels and might be detectable hundreds of kilometres away. Even more interesting is the repetition at 128 seconds intervals. This might be for communication but could be just echo location. Humpbacks find a partner across hundreds of kilometres of ocean. The songs appear to evolve over time. 30 Dolphins have been studied intensively. They do appear to be able to transmit emotion more obviously than other mammals. There appears to be a "help" signal. Overall their language may still consist more of groans, giggles, and sighs, than information transmission. But we are only beginning to understand how to study some of these animals and it cannot be from such an anthropocentric viewpoint as we have generally taken. Diagram illustrating size and shape of a dolphin's brain. Of relevance are some points raised in an online paper by David Kaiser 1990 (Internet) "Dolphins demonstrate many behaviors that show signs of conscious awareness. For instance, behaviors which are illicit and punishable are often performed only when a dolphin believes no one is around (e.g., SavageRumbaugh and Hopkins, 1986). When a dolphin squirts water at a human (to show annoyance), he will often raise his head out of the water to curiously 31 observe the effect his behavior had on the unsuspecting victim (personal observation). Both examples show an awareness of effects one's behavior has on others." (Diagram: comparison of Dolphin and Human Brain) Although our own brain size is about three times that of the great apes, the apes do have considerable language skills. Gorillas, such as Koko learned Ameslan, a kind of sign language used by deaf people. Koko can use over 500 signs and transmit an appreciation of pain or discomfort in other animals, illustrated by Fischer in the example given when Koko saw a horse with a bit in its mouth. Koko signed "Horse sad" and was asked why and responded "teeth". She has made attempts to talk and tried to use a phone once and actually got through to a horrified listener who traced the call thinking the caller was dying. Koko and her buddy, Michael, use a computer keyboard with special keys and then the word is spoken with a speaker. Koko was seen to be able to describe past incidents. She could tell lies, illustrated by the time she was caught chewing a red crayon. Asked what if she was eating the crayon, she replied "Lip" and started applying it as lipstick. This might actually be more of an example of advanced emotion and embarrassment. Some doubt was thrown on some earlier experimentation and it was thought that, as with the donkey that was thought able to count, some subtle hints were given to influence answers and that we might be reading too 32 much into responses. However research on the miniature chimp, the bonobo Kanzi indicated a far higher level of linguistic ability than previously thought. Kanzi used a "lexigram" a keyboard of symbols representing set words. The response could activate a voice. Kanzi communicates to an amazing level using this device. Once when the experimenter had her keys stolen she asked Kanzi to find them. Kanzi went to the culprit and murmured something in his ear, upon which the stolen keys were returned. Kanzi in recent years was able to use 256 geometric symbols and score at least as high as a 2 1/2 year old human. In other words Kanzi appears to be able to speak to us at that age (human) level. However we really do not know much about Kanzi's own language but the chimp had learned ours quite well. The researchers are better these days at appreciating the mixture of devices used by such animals as Kanzi. These include glances, gestures, postures, and orientation. About 5-7 million years ago when hominids split from the other great apes, the real origins of human speech began to develop, pari-passu with the enlargement of the brain and development of certain parts. But before we look at humans, in a later chapter, we need to see how animals have evolved their emotions. The relationship to developing consciousness is taken for granted. 33 (Diagram: Bonobo brain above and Human brain below. remarkably similar) Getting It is of course necessary to distinguish animal communication in general, from language, in the human sense, but because we are more concerned with the overall demonstration of intelligence, the distinction is of less importance for our purposes. We are perhaps more interested in what has been called Biosemiotics. This is the study of sign systems and communications systems in all living creatures. I have focused on the more "intelligent" animals and thus do not consider quite the same broad range that biosemiotics appears to include. So, for our purposes, our biological investigations, so far, reveal an amazing degree of sophistication amongst many animals. The point to take away from this is that once again our notions of intelligence, and even of consciousness, require careful description and definition and we must avoid the anthropocentric trap. In humans we learned to our chagrin, some years ago, that our IQ testing was incredibly biased. I contend that it is even more in need of a widening of scope so that we can see the incredible intelligence of animals. This would include the notion of emotional intelligence in animals. We will take a look at this in the next chapter. 34 Chapter V Emotions in Animals. As many deny the occurrence of higher emotions in animals, it behooves us to look at what we can conclude about their emotions. Susan B.Eirich, Ph.D. in an online essay “Do Animals have emotions” quotes an incident with a pet hyena who had been raised at home initially and then released into a pack. She tells the story of what happened when she went to visit him. He had been attacked by females in the pack. She notes: “He had been attacked by the females in the female-dominated hyena society. The words "How is he" barely escaped my lips when there was an outpouring of pitiful whining. He met me at the fence, falling to his carpals and continuing his cacophony as though recounting the morning's ordeal. His body posture epitomized hyena submissiveness, - bared teeth in an openmouthed appeasement grin, ears plastered to his head, the look of defeat in his stance. As I entered his pen he glued himself to me. His hindquarters turned to jelly. He sank to the floor, and like any frightened creature, he relieved himself all over my boots. With Phoenix entwined in my legs I stumbled to a pile of straw and sat down. Before I was even fully seated he crawled into my lap (which he had long since outgrown), turned over on his back, stared up at me with bewildered eyes, and whined a little longer. As I consoled him and checked for cuts, he lowered his head, closed his eyes, and fell sound asleep." She continues:- "Granted Phoenix had taken an emotional beating, but there was hardly a physical bruise on him. A little disinfectant here, a little patting there, and he was good to go. In scientific terms he was a lowranking hyena who had suffered the stress and acute changes in circulating cortisol levels brought on by social interactions with higher- ranking animals. In layman's terms he was a frightened hyena who needed comforting.” 35 Whilst it is possible that Ms Eirich may be biased, in that she works as a biologist and psychologist at a home for native wildlife in Idaho, her thoughts are nevertheless intriguing and contain much that should humble humans. The notion of a triune brain i.e. a division into three parts: reptilian, paleo-mammalian and neo-mammalian is based on the division of autonomic nervous system, limbic system and true cortical system. The division again would locate breathing, circulation control, reproduction and social dominance, primarily in the autonomic areas. The limbic system is thought to be a central element of controlling our basic emotions in humans, not necessarily refined emotions but basic love, joy, anger etc. The neo-mammalian area is the later more abstract thinking area, advanced problem solving and creation of virtual realities. Eirich points out that she and Jane Goodall, believe that animals can suffer posttraumatic stress and depression. Prozac has been used in animals with beneficial effects and Zoloft and Paxil, used in humans for ObsessiveCompulsive disorder has also been seen in animals with fur-biting or feather pulling, often symptoms of distress in animals. Eirich states : “The chemical neurotransmitters of animals are the same as humans dopamine, serotonin, opioids. The hormones are similar - those used for hormone replacement therapy in women are made from the urine of pregnant mares. The same hormones perform the same functions - oxytocin, for example, initiates maternal bonding, care, tenderness, protection across all the females of all the mammalian species including humans. We can interpret this to mean we are all just bags of chemicals that react- or we can interpret it to mean that tenderness is tenderness; that overwhelming grief at the loss of a young one is overwhelming grief, and is real whether is it "just chemical" or not. It certainly is real to human mothers. And brain scans of animals exhibiting the behavioral patterns of depression, for example, show the animal brain lighting up in the same places they do for depressed humans.” 36 Conscious awareness of emotions may only be a factor of some refinement in evolution, in fact a mere matter of an improved connection between the limbic system and the frontal lobes. As we are aware, in levels of consciousness in patients following head injuries, the levels descend to the brain stem as the injury is more serious. Consciousness similarly descends in complexity and here I am not referring to gross conscious-vunconscious in the absolute awake sense but cognition in general, finetuning and awareness of the environment around. So my doggie “Sadie”, in her awareness of her emotion, is only lacking a certain ability to express emotions in a way more akin to mine. This is not to say that she is not as capable as me of experiencing emotions. Ours are more complex, involving more far-reaching social contact, and capability of abstraction of ideas which may give rise to emotions. We will have cause to return to the levels of brain damage and consciousness in a look at Locked-in-Syndrome, later. We will also have reason to examine various neurological pathologies in humans as contributory towards a theory of consciousness. Grief is really well known in animals. There is the story of one little dog in Scotland who sat every day by his late master’s grave for 14 years. An online article by Sarah Hartwell, entitled “Do Cats Have Emotions? contained the following personal anecdote: “I have personal experience of a pair of cats whose owner had died. The cats refused to eat while in the shelter. To reduce stress, they were fostered in a household and the vet prescribed appetite stimulants. One cat recovered but remained withdrawn for a long period of time. The other continued to pine and became critically ill until it had to be euthanized (prolonged fasting results in hepatic lipidosis or fatty liver disease). Its behaviour was so severely affected that the foster carer considered force-feeding unsuitable; the cat had no interest in life. Post mortem showed no sign of disease, except for that caused by failure to eat.” We do have examples of jealousy and embarrassment from cats and dogs. I had a dog once called Heidi, and when she was getting older and a little blind, she failed to recognize me walking down the road one day. She barked and made to attack, then, on realizing who it was, she suddenly turned towards a bush at the side of the road and pretended to attack it. It was as if she was saying “oh sorry I didn’t realize it was you”. 37 Jeffrey Masson, a psychoanalyst turned animal lover and student says online: “Elephants, for example, feel grief for the death of other elephants as deep as our own, and mourn them in particularly poignant ways. There have been reports of elephants refusing to leave the body of a dead relative, with some elephants removing the tusks, and hiding them in the jungle, as if they somehow knew that humans were hunting elephants for their ivory. Young elephants who had seen their mothers killed in front of them, would often wake up in the night screaming, evidently from nightmares in which they relived the trauma they had been through as witnesses of mass murder.” Masson comments in an online interview about inter-species friendship, in a story from a mid-west U.S. farmer. She had owned a sheep which became blind and was helped by a cow: “The cow had become extremely close to this blind sheep and would spend all day in her company and would guide the sheep wherever she had to go. They were inseparable. When the blind sheep finally died the cow became so distressed that she absolutely refused to move from the spot and stopped eating. Eventually she too died.” Marc Bekoff, who has written in detail on animal emotions, illustrates beautifully how complex animal emotions can be. This is an excerpt from his book "The Emotional Lives of Animals" "A few years ago my friend Rod and I were riding our bicycles around Boulder, Colorado, when we witnessed a very interesting encounter among five magpies. Magpies are corvids, a very intelligent family of birds. One magpie had obviously been hit by a car and was laying dead on the side of the road. The four other magpies were standing around him. One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it-just as an elephant noses the carcass of another elephant- (sic) and stepped back. Another magpie did the same thing. Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass, and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then, all four magpies stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off."(Pg. 1)Bekoff, Marc. 38 The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato, California: New World Library, 2007. The famous gorilla Koko was seen to exhibit great grief at the loss of her pet cat. Humans philosophically make the great leap to other humans, partly backed up by philosophical arguments such as the attack on private language by Wittgenstein. We assume what looks like us must think and feel like us but if it does not look like us then it must be very different. In our arrogance and stupidity this also lies at the basis of racial discrimination, but we also use it to rule out "minds" in animals. Of course the old religious influences raise their heads here as many believers cannot let go of the concept of human souls and human uniqueness. Of course we could consider what a Gorilla would be like with a human brain:- It is a well accepted notion that dogs are thought to suffer from depressions and neurosis. Such human emotions as shyness are thought to apply to dogs. Charles Darwin appeared to have no qualms at dealing openly with this subject and his book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and 39 Animals" remains a classic. Whilst he is more concerned to show human expressions he does refer to how they have evolved from animals and opened the door to more modern works. By restricting ourselves to a totally behaviouristic interpretation of animal expressions we again run the danger of never breaching the gap between animals and humans. "He looks sad", "he seems to be sad", "He is sad" is a leap made in humans but rarely in animals, by most of us. We cannot judge the expression of an emotion on a verbal statement only such as "I feel sad" because I might be lying. We judge it on a total appraisal of subjective statements and a coherence of observations. Personally I see no difficulty in applying the same criteria to animals. Wittgenstein says : "In what sense are my sensations private?-- Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. --In one way this is wrong, and in another, nonsense. If we are using the word "to know" as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain.-- Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! --It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean - except perhaps that I am in pain? ... The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself." (Section 246) "Philosophical Investigations." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. In other words the statement or internal thought "I am in pain" adds nothing but some further "pain behaviour". (See next chapter also). This does not mean we have become total behaviourists denying internal life; we just want to look at it in more subtle ways. Extending this reasoning to animals is really no problem. It is possible to question Wittgenstein on this one, from evolution (also see next chapter) where a nervous system may be developed to react to pain, but the animal may not, in any cogent sense, "know" that it is in pain. He may choose to argue that his philosophical quest 40 does not extend to animals, but I see no reason that animals cannot study philosophy! For us to conclude that because we are not bats we cannot know what is going on inside a bat's mind seems rather naive. I also have no idea what is going on in any other person's mind, by the same reasoning. The argument from homology is thin. So although we may not have "private language" and do communicate quite well, the argument from analogy, or homology, applies to human-animal interactions as well surely. We approach that theme several times throughout this book. Data from the blind-sight experiments in humans, indicates that patients react in every way as if they know but do not consciously "know". Once again science and biology may provide food for philosophers. We went through an era of rigid behaviourism and at about the same time we were exposed to Logical Positivism, both dead ends. At this time I do not feel we need to justify the importance of recognizing animals as far closer to us than we have generally thought. We do need to skip the unconscious biases and do some creative science. The argument that if it looks human then it must have selfawareness like me, but the animal is different, is difficult to maintain when we conjure up some different scenarios. What it you imagine looking at a person from a very primitive tribe and you are thinking "I wonder if she thinks at all?" Or if you wandered back through time to a Neanderthal man and might then wonder if they shared your consciousness or any similar thought processes. Or again, if you are looking at a seriously autistic child and have passing thoughts like "I wonder if anyone is home at all?" or a brain damaged person or someone with advance Alzheimer's where there often appears to be nobody home. Do we judge them all by this same standard we apply to animals? But they are human you say! Then what defines being human? A true behaviourist would actually be a solipsist, as he would have to deny thought processes and consciousness in other humans, as beyond justifiability. Similarly we have seen from the above that even within humans the differences are of degree of consciousness and it becomes less of 41 a stretch to extend the possibility of conscious thinking, to animals of a certain complexity. We will not get carried away to the point of embracing Alfred North Whitehead's notion that plants are capable of feelings and conscious thought, so the only remaining issue is where to draw the line. By studying emotions in animals we can close the gap somewhat with regard to thinking and consciousness also. However pain represents a significant evolutionary step and the refinement of pain, leading even to emotional pain, forces us to study pain in animals, to see similarities to our own expressions of pain. We will examine this area in the following chapter. 42 Chapter VI Pain in Animals. Pain can be considered a universal attribute of any animal with a nervous system of any complexity. But we humans focus so much on pain that we do need to look at how much other animals experience it, or seem to. We have mentioned in earlier that fish may not “feel” pain as we do because they lack the brain structure to “know” that they are in pain. They seemingly only react with avoidance to noxious substances. It is true that we see in head injured patients levels of consciousness where only some primitive avoidance reaction is taking place, and there is a probably valid assumption that no pain is being felt. We do need to examine this notion a little further however. The whole philosophical issue of pain may arise again later with regard to humans. Very simply I can be fairly sure I am in pain but quite unsure that anyone else at all is in pain. A lot has to be taken for granted. But it does seem that pain has a primitive basic level and interpretive centre, and, in addition, a more refined cortical analysis. So pain behaviour may differ for several different reasons. There is also a physical and emotional aspect. Generally "emotional pain" is denied to animals, but that is anthropocentric thinking of the highest degree. Our mistaken notions of who can feel pain have even been applied to young humans. Years ago we routinely performed circumcisions on infant males with no anaesthesia, based on the same mistaken notion that they were not developed enough to really "feel" pain. I must own up to have performed my share of those also. We are moving closer to "if it looks like it is suffering, then it is probably in pain" which is a more humane conclusion in a world where we are hoping to move closer to our animal relatives and not see them as objects evolved for our pleasure. Boiling lobsters whilst they are still alive, strikes me as incredibly cruel, though I am not a vegan (see other discussion on pain and brain anatomy). I am not sure how I would go about killing a lobster anyway. My time with the Inuit in the High Arctic taught me that you can hunt a caribou and still keep respect for it, with certain rituals to demonstrate that respect. Not that I haven't watched indiscriminate 43 cruelty to wild animals, whilst I lived and worked there. There are no idyllic races of man. Pain is primarily detected by nociceptive receptors, even invertebrates possess these. However their level of response may be only at a stimulusresponse level. They completely lack the higher brain anatomy to process pain. Vertebrates however process the nociceptive input and can send signals the other way as well. The medulla, the thalamus and the limbic system are all involved in assessing pain, in addition to the cortex. Fish only possess a rudimentary cortex. Thus we assume that fish, at least, are incapable of emotional pain, grief, sadness etc. Primates, mammals, birds and perhaps reptiles and amphibians, have a sufficiently developed cortex to warrant the possibility of emotional pain. It remains for science to find evidence. Some scientists argue that only primates have the ability to really "feel" pain, as opposed to simply avoiding a noxious stimulus, and therefore only primates could be considered conscious. In humans we may have two levels of response-: an initial withdrawal from the source of pain, followed by higher level responses, even cortical, 44 such as analysis or conjuring up legal settlements, which immediately make the pain worse. (Diagram): illustrates a more complex analysis of pain, whereas in more primitive nervous systems the animal will only have sub-cortical stimulus avoidance pathways. Here we see how the brain registers and feels pain. One comment on this diagram:- it contains a philosophical error in that it documents “Pain Sensation IN”. However the sensation of pain is a cortical judgment, and we do not have pain sensations or an appreciation of “pain” peripherally. As we have seen above in the discussion on emotions in animals, there is good evidence, albeit difficult to obtain scientific verification, that monkeys, cats, dogs and birds can show emotional pain, grief, etc. They can show depression in its vegetative symptoms of lethargy, 45 lack of motivation, anorexia, depressed sexual drive etc, the same as we experience in depression in humans and probably due to the same lack of circulating brain chemicals. As to the argument that we could never really know that an animal is in pain because they are not like us, once again, it is necessary to note that I really cannot be sure another human is in pain either. We are back to the arguments in philosophy as to whether any mind other than my own exists. If we are that sceptical we are probably misusing language and the powers of questioning and thought. An over-emphasis on completely objective scientific and empirical verification has dominated us for a little too long. We need to pay heed to qualitative science as well as quantitative. We do not throw out rational thought with this paradigm change. Even fish, who we would assume are not “conscious” in our sense of possessing “consciousness”, can remember approximately 40 individuals and measure size of opponents before deciding to fight with them. They appear to have a certain sense of their own size. Limited self-awareness no doubt, but something is there. What we are trying to emphasize is again differences in degree, not kind, overall. In terms of pain we tend not to make distinctions amongst humans but surely science would indicate that we perhaps should. We know for a fact that certain diseases, such as leprosy, alter the perception of pain, as do certain drugs. We do not believe lesser intelligence implies less pain response, but it is commonly thought, and commented on by anthropologists, that more primitive peoples deal with pain more easily. After all it was not too long ago that most dental work was done with no local freezing, now I cannot imagine having that done. Richard Sarjeant, The Spectrum of Pain. (London: Hart Davis, 1969), p. 72, says: "Every particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute that ours--visual acuity in certain birds, hearing in most wild animals, and 46 touch in others; these animals depend more than we do today on the sharpest possible awareness of a hostile environment. Apart from the complexity of the cerebral cortex (which does not directly perceive pain) their nervous systems are almost identical to ours and their reactions to pain remarkably similar, though lacking (so far as we know) the philosophical and moral overtones. The emotional element is all too evident, mainly in the form of fear and anger." We have not yet covered the complexity of the embryological development of the brain. The relevance of this and its connection to notions of “intelligence” and “consciousness” will be examined in the following chapter. 47 Chapter VII Some embryology and the development of the human brain. For the following embryological and very brief summary, I am grateful to Arnold B. Scheibel, MD, professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry and former Director of the Brain Research Institute, UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA. His online article provided the basis for my summary. Ernst Haeckel, a biologist in the 19 th century, came up with the theory that “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” i.e. that the embryonic phases will show the evolutionary pattern. Whilst his idea is only accepted with considerable modifications, it has been a richly creative concept. We will look at the embryonic brain and its development. 48 The first element of brain to form, embryologically, in humans, is the notochord, which is thought to recapitulate the transition from invertebrates to vertebrates. It goes on to form the segmented spinal column, made up of 32 segments or vertebrae. Ectoderm overlying the chord then forms a neural plate, which develops a fold. As this fold completes its shape it forms a tube, which will go on to become the nervous system. This lengthens but might not completely close. There is left an anterior and posterior opening, these are called neuropores. If the anterior neuropore fails to close, serious consequences follow, as this portion of the tube forms the cerebral hemispheres. Thus this defect leads to the awful situation of an anencephalic baby. The infant is born with no brain above the brain stem. There is basically no skull above the eyes. It may live up to a week, but usually dies within hours of birth. Those of us who have delivered such babies will never forget such an event. At the distal end, failure to close, leads to the more familiar spina bifida. The well-known pilonidal cysts, generally form in the tiny residual tract of a very minor spina bifida (often known as occulta). After the tube closes successfully, the anterior portion divides into five vesicles, which become the cerebral hemispheres, diencephalon, midbrain, pons and cerebellum. Then the walls of the tube form the rest of the nervous system; ganglia, peripheral nerves etc. The way the cerebral cortex itself develops is quite fascinating. Layers, i.e. six in total, form with successive migrations from the outside in. They use radial glial guide cells to migrate. If the layers do not free themselves from the guide cells, a pile up and the formation of abnormal neurons results. When mutant mice were studied with this developmental abnormality, bizarre motor behaviour was noted. The parallel in human disease is not yet known but it is likely present. 49 The other part of this phase is the formation of temporary connections, later to be abandoned in favour of more appropriate connections. How this is decided is unknown, but the abnormal cortical connections made when the process malfunctions, may result in certain cognitive and emotional disorders. After the nerve cells reach their destination, they will develop dendrites and the lengthier axons. Then we see the formation of the interesting corpus callosum, the only real connection between hemispheres. As Scheibel says: “The two hemispheres have differing, though complementary, roles and it has been speculated that the corpus callosum facilitates the interaction of these effects. For example, for most of us, specific portions of the left hemisphere (Broca's and Wernicke's areas) are primarily responsible for the semantic and computational aspects of language. Corresponding areas of the right hemisphere are involved in the emotional and prosodic activities and the interweaving of these two facets of language behavior make for interesting and comprehensible narration. If activity of the right hemisphere and its interaction with the left is compromised, either by cortical damage (e.g. a stroke) or by surgical interruption of the corpus callosal fibers, this relationship breaks down. Speech then sounds mechanical and flat, without personal warmth and emotion.” Work done on so-called split brain has left us with the implication that if you cut the corpus callosum you may actually form two individual consciousnesses. This does not explain multiple personalities, which is a different phenomenon altogether, but does have tremendous philosophical implications. Are there two "persons"? Is behaviour originating in one side responsible for the total behaviour of the "person"? (see slightly further on). The subsequent formation of myelin sheaths has been mentioned already and speeds up conduction many fold. We have mentioned already the enormous number of brain cells in the human brain, up to 100,000 million, and each neuron may have 10,000 synaptic connections and across each connection there may be up to 100 neurotransmitters. Add to that the parallel processing capabilities of the human brain and you begin to see the enormous size and functional capability of this biocomputer. 50 However it is worthwhile pointing out the amazing achievements in intelligent activity of animals with between 10,000 and 100,000 neurons. This leads us to conclude that as humans, we are only using a very small percentage of our total horsepower. (Diagram: general anatomy of human brain.) Synaptic connections continue to be made throughout the first 6-8 years of a child’s life and then plateau and decay. There is a numerical decrease after puberty. This makes you wonder, is that it? Are we just in decline after that? Well it seems that this decline is a pruning process of unwanted connections. Remember the discussion of REM sleep and the possible process of weaning out of connections that it may be used for. This may be a similar process. Luria, the great Russian neurophysiologist, said that it was forgetting that was the more important human process in memory, not remembering. He had a case of a patient who could forget nothing. The patient suffered intensely and could not function in daily life. All was equally important. 51 Split Brain Theory: Embryologically humans appear to develop two almost identical halves of the brain. Then we develop the Corpus Callosum, a bridge between the two hemispheres. When they are not joined, as they should be, certain things occur. Over the years we have become familiar with the epoch making work of Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga and the split brain. Certain visual information would no longer pass between brains split at the corpus callosum. Actually there are several commissures connecting left and right lobes but the corpus callosum is the main one. Gazzaniga says in the online publication, 25 years after his initial work: “If we projected an image to the right visual field - that is, to the left hemisphere, which is where information from the right field is processed the patients could describe what they saw. But when the same image was displayed to the left visual field, the patients drew a blank: they said they didn’t see anything. Yet if we asked them to point to an object similar to the one being projected, they could do so with ease. The right brain saw the image and could mobilize a nonverbal response. It simply couldn’t talk about what it saw.” He goes on to comment on the main differences between the left and right hemispheres: “Ultimately, we discovered that the two hemispheres control vastly different aspects of thought and action. Each half has its own specialization and thus its own limitations and advantages. The left brain is dominant for language and speech. The right excels at visual-motor tasks. The language of these findings has become part of our culture: writers refer to themselves as leftbrained, visual artists as right-brained.” Gazzaniga surmises at the end of his summary: 52 “Realizing the strengths and weaknesses of each hemisphere prompted us to think about the basis of mind, about this overarching organization. After many years of fascinating research on the split brain, it appears that the inventive and interpreting left hemisphere has a conscious experience very different from that of the truthful, literal right brain. Although both hemispheres can be viewed as conscious, the left brain’s consciousness far surpasses that of the right. Which raises another set of questions that should keep us busy for the next 30 years or so.” (sic) The Split Brain theory does raise the amusing possibility that although most of the time we seem to function as one person, with one consciousness we are only a razor blade away from being two people with two consciousnesses. This lends new meaning to the old saying “I can’t make up my mind” or “I’m in two minds about ….” On the issue of split brain and double personalities, we do need to cover briefly the differences between the two sides of the brain. These are, in general, well known and we do not need to labour them, but a brief summary may be helpful in further painting the whole subject of consciousness. The awareness of this difference came historically from speech losses in stroke patients. To quote an online article from an interesting website : "thebigview.com" edited by Thomas Knierim. " Clinical evidence suggests that the two sides of the cerebrum serve different functions. Injuries to the left side usually impair reading, writing, speaking, calculation, and understanding. Injuries to the right side have less dramatic effects, but tend to affect spatial perception and movement. More extensive research has shown that the left and right hemisphere’s involvement in certain functions is disproportionate. Left Side Dominance General Function Right Side Dominance Words Letters Vision Geometric Patterns Faces 53 Emotional Expression Language Sounds Audition Non-language Sounds Music Touch Tactual Patterns (Braille) Complex Movement Movement Spatial Movement Patterns Verbal Memory Memory Nonverbal Memory Speech Reading Writing Arithmetic Language Emotional Content Spatial Ability Geometry Direction Distance Mental Rotation of Shapes Yet, it would be wrong to speak of compartmentalisation. The hemispheres of the brain work in tandem as a complex whole. In a famous experiment in the 1950s, the American neuropsychologist Roger Sperry was involved with separating the corpus callosum, to treat epileptics. The corpus callosum is a strand of approx. 200 million nerve fibres connecting the left and right hemispheres, which the brain uses to transfer signals between the hemispheres. The patients remained largely normal, but each hemisphere worked independently. Human split brain patients seemed to have two independent brains, each with its own abilities, memories, and emotions. Notably, the left hemisphere of split brain patients was capable of speech, whereas the right hemisphere was not." It actually makes sense when one thinks about the reasons for having “two brains”. Many internal organs are duplicated for safety. If you lose one kidney it is really not that serious. The two do the same thing. But it would be a waste if both sides of the brain could not be of use. And they do need to communicate so we have the corpus callosum. Yet the degree of integration 54 is such that splitting this connection does tend to create two virtual new identities. We may have reason to return to some embryological principles in discussing psychological and neurological diseases later. For now we need to move on to a discussion of what “consciousness” might mean and to what animals we might apply the term. Does brain size relate to consciousness or even intelligence? Seemingly from brain size alone, the whales would win. However given ratios of body size to brain humans are at 2.1% whereas a Sperm Male is 0.02% but a dolphin is 0.94%. An interesting example, of the brain size to body size ratio, is the spiny anteater (an egg laying mammal, related to the duck-billed platypus), which has a neocortex (the so-called 'modern' part of the brain, which is greatly developed in primates and humans) relatively larger than that of a human. Yet nobody has so far put forward any claims for superior "intelligence" in spiny anteaters. In an article “Brains, Behaviour and Intelligence in Cetaceans (Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises)” published by High North in 1994, Margaret Klinowska at Cambridge University notes that even the cortical folding does not equate to “brain power” or intelligence. Bottlenose dolphins, horses and chimpanzees all have more convolutions than we do. As cetacean ancestors returned to the oceans some 70 MYA and the new mammalian brain of land mammals seems to have evolved 50 MYA the poor dolphin missed out on certain 55 developments. One particular layer in the neocortex is missing, according to Klinowska, yet its function remains uncertain. (Diagram: comparative brain sizes-- not allowing for animal size) One most intriguing theory, quoted by the same author, is from some studies indicating that REM or rapid-eye-movement sleep may serve an important function called “reverse-learning” in which the brain during sleep removes certain annoying neuronal connections. Dolphins and Spiny Anteaters have large brains but perhaps need larger brains because the cerebral parking space is overloaded with stuff they cannot remove as they apparently do not dream! Now I understand my professor at medical school who advised me to 56 be cognizant of limited cerebral parking space. He must have been warning me to quit partying and get some REM sleep. We have examined some embryology and relative brain to body size ratios and now we need to move on to looking at the actual substrata of consciousness, the actual structure of the brain. This part is quite technical and is included for those interested in seeing in more detail the substrate of consciousness, but the single lesson for those wishing to skim the chapter is to note how complex consciousness really is and how dependent on many areas in the brain working together as an integrated whole system. 57 Chapter VIII Division and Function of the parts of the Brain. We need to look closer at the anatomy and function of the human brain because an understanding of the complexity is crucial to the total physiological theory of consciousness being proposed. Hindbrain Myencephalon: 1. Medualla Metencephalon: 1. Pons 2. Cerebellum The hind brain is mainly a continuation of the spinal cord and contains all the ascending and descending fibres connecting the brain and spinal cord. We will see in the next chapter how this level becomes, as it were, the gateway of consciousness. Damage at the hindbrain level can paralyze the body but leaves consciousness intact. Damage above this level erodes consciousness. Mesencephalon or Midbrain Small but crucial area of the brain with two subdivisions: 1. 2. Tectum (dorsal; marks the top of the mesencephalon) Tegmentum (ventral; marks the bottom of the mesencephalon) Two main areas in the Tectum are the Inferior (auditory) and Superior Colliculi (visual). Now, interestingly enough, in humans these are gates and controllers to visual cortical areas, yet in earlier species they represented the 58 only “visual cortex”. Tegmentum is the area below the tectum. This area is concerned with reflex pathways and perhaps whether someone remains unconscious or conscious and it also controls certain homeostatic pathways i.e. biochemical balance. Primary structures in the midbrain: 1. Substantia Nigra a. Key source of dopameric neurones. The connection to DOPA has led many to speculate that not only Parkinson’s Disease comes from degeneration in this area, but also Schizophrenia. The substantia nigra is plays a critical role in controlling eye movement, motor planning, reward seeking, learning, and addiction. b. PAG (Periaqueductal Grey):- an area of growing interest as lesions here have a serious effect on consciousness. It refers to an area surrounding the aqueduct in the midbrain. It is a key source of opiate receptors/ binding. 59 2. Red nucleus The Red nucleus is almost considered to be vestigial. Critically important in other mammals, it now, in humans, seems to be more of an informant, between the motor cortex and the cerebellum Diencephalon- part of the forebrain Primary Structures: 1. 2. Thalamus Hypothalamus (1) Thalamus • Large group of nuclei located anterior and dorsal to the midbrain • Relay station for the majority of the sensory information that projects to the cerebral cortex. Thus it can control arousal, sleep, visual information, auditory data. 60 (2) Hypothalamus The hypothalamus regulates many ‘primitive functions’ including the response to stress. It also has a key role in motivational behaviour (making us find food, water), including sexual behaviour. In addition it houses at least some ‘body clocks’. Although the hypothalamus is a small area it is extremely important behaviourally. It regulates the activity of the pituitary gland Mammillary bodies: These represent specific hypothalamic nuclei. These are two fascinating little bodies that are attached to the underside of the brain. What they control is very important as they process memory, specifically recognition memory (mine must be failing!) and are thought possibly to add some degree of smell to memories. This is really interesting as there are people whose memory is essentially linked to smell and who see names as a smell or taste. The Telencephalon:- the forebrain This area is the most recent in the phylogenetic sense. Primary Structures: 1. 2. The limbic system and basal ganglia The cerebral cortex including the hippocampus (1) The Limbic system (From limbus, meaning ring) The limbic system seems to be involved in the fours Fs: Feeding, fighting, fleeing and sexual behaviour. It is thought to be the centre of our emotional make up. The Limbic and Basal Ganglia are primary for: emotion, aggressive behaviour, fear, pleasure and several key aspects of personality. Some components of the limbic system are: 61 • Hippocampus--converts short term memory into long term memory • amygdala-- this plays a response role, centre for rage and anger, damage here may cause indifference to fear, anger and sexual pleasure. • The thalamus itself is a regulator of sleep and wakefulness, levels of awareness and thus consciousness levels. Basal Ganglia Main Structures • • • • • • Caudate nucleus Putamen Globus Pallidus Subthalamus Amygdala (substantia Nigra)--plays a role in reward, addiction and also movement function (Parkinson's). 62 Broadly speaking, these areas deal with information from the cerebral cortex, analyse it and return it to the cortex, through the thalamus. They also, in conjunction with the cerebellum, coordinate voluntary movement. Damage to the Basal Ganglia is associated with Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease. “The basal ganglia are regarded as sub-cortical nuclear complexes that play a critical role in the integration of motor activity” (Noback, 1996). “Overall, there is growing evidence that alterations in basal ganglia circuits with non-motor areas of cortex occur in a wide variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, including not only schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, but also depression, Tourette’s syndrome, autism, and attention deficit disorder..” Middleton and Strick (2000) 63 To describe the function of the Basal Ganglia as a whole, would take a textbook, and that is only what we know about it at present. It does however appear to play a critical role as an arbiter, a decision maker, about which potential actions, that the cortex is planning, should be executed. The role of Dopamine as a reward system in training the basal ganglia, as to which actions should be rewarded, is yet to be analysed. Also the BG play a specific role in planning and coordination of specific movement sequences as well as temporal sequencing. The role in fine movement has been studied by Hikosaka, Takikawa, and Kawagoe in "Role of the Basal Ganglia in the Control of Purposive Saccadic Eye Movements" Physiological Reviews Vol. 80, No3 July 2000 pp. 953-978. The authors conclude that the BG control eye movement with two kinds of output-: (1) control over the thalamo-cortical networks (2) control over the brain stem motor networks. The Saccade movement is a purposive rapid eye movement, damage to this mechanism results in the fixed stare of the Parkinsonian patient. The BG appear to select the appropriate drive by control of tonic inhibition. To further illustrate the immense complexity and subtlety of our notion of consciousness we can look at the connecting pathways involved in the Substantia Nigra. Taken from Wikipedia, article on Substantia Nigra. 64 froM COftf'XI OhiiiiiiUde'llt (tlll:lllb) .... .... Diagram: Circuits of the basal ganglia. 65 The diagram shows 2 coronal slices that have been superimposed to include the involved basal ganglia structures. + and - signs at the point of the arrows indicate respectively whether the pathway is excitatory or inhibitory in effect. Green arrows refer to excitatory glutamatergic pathways, red arrows refer to inhibitory GABAergic pathways and turquoise arrows refer to dopaminergic pathways that are excitatory on the direct pathway and inhibitory on the indirect pathway. Note that dis-inhibitory pathways in effect are excitatory on the feedback to the cortex, while dis-dis-inhibitory pathways in effect are inhibitory. Note the incredible complexity of pathways, and that this part of the brain controls some fine movement yet malfunction leads to Parkinson's tremor and even on to a psychosis! The point once again is to illustrate how delicate the balance of a normal consciousness is. Furthermore the point is to show that functionally we are more and more able to break down the complexity of personality, human consciousness and the total mystery of the human being into comprehensible portions. I am not saying there will be no mystery left but we are making progress. By bringing together all the subjects studied in this book I am hoping to make the subject of consciousness far more of a comprehensible object of study. What we are looking at directly in this somewhat technical chapter is the functioning of consciousness in action, bit by bit. 66 (2) The Cerebral Cortex. The cerebral cortex in the human. (Diagram of Cerebral Cortex.) Functional breakdown: Parietal Lobe - involved in the reception and processing of sensory information from the body. Frontal Lobe - involved with decision-making, problem solving, and planning. 67 Function: • • • • • • • Motor Functions Higher Order Functions Planning Reasoning Judgement Impulse Control Memory Occipital Lobe - involved with interpreting visual data. Temporal Lobe - involved with memory, emotion, hearing, and language. We have seen throughout this chapter a lot of detail. This is to illustrate the complexity of the concept of "consciousness" and show part of the enormous necessary substrate. Much of this detail could be passed over, if it seems confusing, yet it is showing again and again the necessary links to the notion of consciousness. The development of the cortex itself seems to be the critical element which raises our level of consciousness and self-awareness to a higher degree than the more "advanced primates". Yet we are still looking at differences of degrees. It is also critical to point out that we are attempting to show a picture of a complex mechanism that functions holistically. We cannot break the brain into little centres as we have tended to do in the past. We can begin to localize functions, but that by no means entails that a certain area is the centre for that whole function. The plasticity and multifunctionality of the brain is critical. As Luria, the Russian neurophysiologist indicated, the brain cells are pluripotential. Furthermore, to reiterate a point made earlier, we have to examine the c o m p l e t e functioning 68 animal to examine consciousness, we cannot even localise it into the brain, although we are seeing specific levels where it can be altered. That is an anatomical breakdown. When it comes to the physiological animal, we still need to think of chemical alterations in the body as affecting consciousness. For instance, alterations in blood sugar levels, fever and its effect on the brain function, mind-altering drugs, even such things as fatigue-induced hallucinations. So it is time to examine some further issues with levels of consciousness and begin to open up the examination to philosophical overtones. Are there absolutely critical anatomical levels where consciousness is determined? 69 Chapter IX Definitions of Levels of Consciousness and a discussion on Locked-in Syndrome and preliminary philosophical discussion. It is considered obvious, but it is still interesting to contemplate the role of sleep in the development of consciousness and also to examine the evolution of sleep through the animal kingdom. Sleep is primarily controlled in the hypothalamus, i.e. in the limbic system and does appear to have an important role in synaptic health. Again we have the notion of REM sleep and its function in maintaining synaptic health. Learning appears to continue during sleep, possibly by cleaning our cerebral parking space. REM sleep may have a role in "reverse-learning" by eliminating certain neuronal connections made during waking hours. We refer to this later. Luria refers to the critical importance of forgetting. Warm-blooded animals sleep, most cold-blooded vertebrates just rest. The cold-blooded ones that do sleep, have no REM sleep. Sleep is also known to enhance the immune system and several experiments have shown this. All in all, sleep is a development in warm-blooded creatures with more developed frontal lobes and cortices in general. As far as consciousness is concerned we need some starting definitions:What practical definitions can we work with? The sense of responding to one’s environment and being aware of the environment, approaches the sense we generally mean by consciousness. Making decisions based on input is obvious. But simply “being aware” of one’s environment and reacting to it over and above simple reflexes does not quite reach the sense of selfawareness we want to deal with. Then there is being aware of a sensation, say a red patch, or a sound. Almost all animals possess this to varying degrees. Finally there is thinking about thinking or self-awareness. This may turn out to be a delusion. It could either be a self-referential dead end, or simply an unanswerable question. What preceded the Big Bang or Singularity, or what happens after infinity, are all examples of questions that we just don’t need to ask really. If consciousness in general is simply an 70 emergent property of brain development, the notion of self-awareness may be either a meditational delusion or a linguistic creation. Or, perhaps, going back to the sensory blocking theory, it is a method of heightening sensory awareness by removing blocking distractions. By emergent we would mean that the properties of the whole are now predicated by prior knowledge of the structure and properties of the parts. Now this does not mean that different laws of physics apply, just different laws of behaviour for the whole over its parts. We will have cause in the final chapter to refer to a detailed biological theory of consciousness. In his famous paper of 1974, Thomas Nagel wrote about “What it is like to be a Bat?” and concluded that we will never, nor can ever know. However there is “batness” albeit only known to a bat. This subject has come up before but is of critical importance, as it has traditionally offered such a stumbling block. (Diagram: what it is like to be a bat?) 71 As previously mentioned, I am not sure that the same argument does not apply to other humans, i.e. other than me. There is a similarity of appearance and so by analogy I assume I know what it is like to be a human being, but I am not sure that I could ever say that I know what it is like to be another human being. So in fact by analogy I may know a little bit about what it is like to be a bat. If indeed “consciousness”, in the advanced self-aware state, is an emergent property of neural structure, then we would expect animals to possess something similar to what we have. Language may be the most significant factor in confusing the whole issue. Again we must bear in mind that it may introduce confusing aspects. Words, which may possess meaning in a certain context, may become meaningless when strung together in another way i.e. another sentence. An invisible pink hippopotamus sounds like a normal existent grammatically, but would really to all intents and purposes appear totally meaningless. A large part of philosophy is most likely similar to this and I should not do it anymore but I enjoy it. It may in fact be some time before we can come up with a workable definition of consciousness and we may have to form some ground-based theories of qualitative scientific research and go on to explore those before we can say much more. We have commented before on the mirror-image recognition of certain chimpanzees and it is also apparent that bottlenose dolphins have a fairly evident self-awareness from mirror images. Even if we add emotions to the basic concept we know that we have seen considerable emotional response in many animals. We will leave all discussion of souls to theologians as this is strictly an attempt at rational enquiry. If we are worried about animals and free will, then one only has to come and watch “Wagstaff” my cat, as she hovers on the front doorstep, in the morning, trying to make the awfully difficult decision as to whether she should go out for a little fresh air. She sits there and says “I know I can either stay in or go out, I know he wants me out of his way for a while so he can write his stupid philosophy, but I will exercise my free will and then make a choice. I know I require 12 degrees centigrade and I am not quite sure if the sun is warm enough yet – oh what the hell I may as well go out for a while anyway”. There is as much free will as I have in deciding 72 whether to have another pint of beer before leaving the squash club- in fact that is probably pre-determined. Firstly we must of course distinguish awake from asleep, or coma. Some of my lecturers in medical school evidenced extreme difficulty in this distinction, amongst their students. I am paraphrasing from an article by James L Bernat "Chronic Consciousness Disorders" Ann Rev Med 2009 60:381-92. One major advance to the biological study of consciousness has been fMRI (Functional MRI) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans. In unresponsive patients fMRI has shown evidence of conscious awareness when neurological exam was unable to do so. Consciousness consists of wakefulness and awareness. For wakefulness we require a functioning brain stem reticular system and certain connections. Awareness of self is at a slightly higher level in the thalamic nuclei and cortical and subcortical connections. Obviously a lower lesion destroying wakefulness will remove awareness also. Coma is a state with neither awareness nor wakefulness. Temporary response to stimuli is called stupor with resumption of coma when the stimulus is removed. Patients can recover from coma after hours, or weeks, but if they do not they either die or enter a Vegetative State (VS). In this state there is usually wakefulness but no awareness of self. In VS the damage is at the level of the thalamus but not the reticular activating system. Minimal Conscious State (MCS) patients exhibit impaired responsiveness but some awareness of self, they may gaze at moving targets and even say a few words, plus some response to questions. The damage level is the same as for VS but less severe. These are both potential recovery states. In a later chapter we will have to become very detailed and illustrate a variety of neurological disorders. The purpose of that is to add to the physiological normal mechanisms of consciousness, which we have already covered, and then to show the enormous variations of consciousness that arise from disease. We are still examining different levels of consciousness, 73 to illustrate the incredible complexity of the concept. With knowledge of the vast number of syndromes where the functioning of consciousness goes wrong, we gain insight into what consciousness actually is. We may still not reach a definition, but we will have an understanding. Locked-in-Syndrome provides one of the most intriguing glimpses into what level of brain injury actually is a kind of gateway to the whole concept of consciousness. Locked-in Syndrome This is one of the most fascinating and sad conditions known to us. LIS shows us where the very gateway of consciousness is located. It is not actually a disorder of consciousness at all. That is what makes it interesting. Awareness and wakefulness are intact, although the patient may have tremendous difficulties communicating. PET scans and fMRI (functional MRI) do show some diagnostic signs although they are essentially normal, showing considerable activity. There is total paralysis except for upper eyelid and vertical eye movement. fMRI has begun to be predictive in VS (Vegetative State), a most encouraging discovery. Bernat concludes his article by positing that we may move away from more clinical diagnoses of consciousness disorders to a pathophysiological model. In LIS we have a very distinct level of damage, although some patients even lose the minimal movement available to other patients, which must be even more torture. It is caused by a brain stem lesion, often due to infarction (arterial damage) in the area of the Pons in the brain stem. Traumatic Brain Injury, various medication overdoses, stroke involving the basilar artery, even a pontine myelinolysis (breakdown of the myelin sheath, due to sudden over correction of sodium deficiency), may all cause this condition. The olfactory nerve is not a true cranial nerve but part of the brain technically. The optic nerve also does not join the brainstem and is therefore somewhat spared in this damage. A small part of the oculomotor, or 3rd cranial nerve, is most often spared also. This innervates the Levator 74 Palpebrae, the muscle which raises the eyelid. This is really quite interesting from an evolutionary and embryological sense, and shows the extreme importance of vision. The anatomy here explains the lesion and the consequences and also has tremendous implications for “consciousness”. So we do have to go into a little anatomical detail. The above diagram illustrates how the level of the lesion may spare the first three "cranial" nerves (olfactory, optic and oculomotor). The optic nerve actually arises from an outpouching of the diencephalon and is covered in myelin rather than the Schwann cells of more peripheral nerves. It is thus part of the brain truly. The Oculomotor nerve (Cr. N. III) arises from the midbrain and is also spared in this condition. It has two nuclei. • The oculomotor nucleus originates at the level of the superior colliculus. The muscles it controls are the striated muscle in levator palpebrae superioris and all extraocular muscles except for the superior oblique muscle and the lateral rectus 75 muscle. • The Edinger-Westphal nucleus supplies parasympathetic fibres to the eye via the ciliary ganglion, and thus controls the sphincter pupillae muscle (affecting pupil constriction) and the ciliary muscle (affecting accommodation). These are generally intact in LIS. The oculomotor nerve has two divisions: In L.I.S. the Levator palpebrae works and also the rectus superior, so the patient can look up and move the eyelid. The lower root of the nerve (Inferior division) is usually damaged. 76 Detailed diagram of rectal muscles, illustrating where the paralysis in L.I.S. occurs:- only 2 and 9 is spared. Rectus muscles: 2 = superior, 3 = inferior, 4 = medial, 5 = lateral Oblique muscles: 6 = superior, 8 = inferior Other muscle: 9 = levator palpebrae superioris Other structures: 1 = Annulus of Zinn, 7 = Trochlea, 10 = Superior tarsus, 11 = Sclera, 12 = Optic nerve 2 and 9 will remain working but little else. Yet this patient remains fully conscious and fully self aware though with total paralysis essentially. Everything below this is paralysed, thus effectively cutting these poor patients off almost totally from all sensory and motor interaction with the "outside" world. This does indicate pretty well exactly where consciousness arises in the brain, in the sense of levels only, and does enable us to start a pretty good working definition of consciousness. To discuss normal consciousness we require a functioning brain above the pons, a balanced chemical environment in the body as a whole, especially in the brain. We also need a thousand small pathways and centres of function to be working fairly normally. The list of neurological disorders shown in Chapter X illustrates just how critical small areas of function are. So we cannot call consciousness any one thing and we will only now move ahead 77 in physiology as we tease out more and more functional aspects of consciousness. There arises a need to distinguish consciousness as a biological entity from self-awareness in the sense used by philosophers. Self-awareness, putting it simply, gives rise to the "Hard Problem" referred to by Chalmers, i.e. the self-awareness issue. Now it is incredibly complex and there are some thought experiments we could carry out of an anthropological philosophical nature. Imagine a very primitive species of man for a moment. Not that long out of the trees, as we say, and involved in very basic survival, but with some primitive language developments. Probably he does not have words as we know them, and certainly not more than pictographs. But this urge to communicate is there, along with the desire to communicate more than the pictograph. Presumably then there is now an evolutionary advantage (i.e. natural selection) in a better expression of the dangers or the food supply or expressing an emotion for a partner, but to imagine thinking as we know it or even self-awareness, as we describe it, is difficult. Fast-forward to early civilization, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 BCE and we can know about, and imagine, more thinking ability, development of some primitive languages, and we can start imagining where the evolution of consciousness has got us. So where the biological entity of consciousness evolves, the issue of when self-awareness can be said to have evolved, may never be answered, but again, at a certain level of consciousness, selfawareness may also evolve and still be biological. But to have a concept of self-awareness need not lead to dualism by the back door. It may be totally created by the misuse of language. If we believe that, then we are partly avoiding the philosophical dilemma by saying the "I-Thou" dichotomy is perhaps invented, delusionary, a linguistic invention and in fact, a categorical error if we imply it means anything meaningful. Let us leave for now the preliminary discussion on consciousness, and pass on to pathology, and see if we cannot gain some contribution from disorders of brain/mind. I want to show that “consciousness” as I understand 78 it is a phenomenon derived from the evolving brain and depending on the normal function of a great many parts of the brain. So, diminished cortical function, a damaged hypothalamus or amygdaloid nucleus will actually alter the consciousness of the affected person. It may well alter during the diurnal cycle, or under drugs, or with depression also. 79 Chapter X Varieties of consciousness, neurological disorders that shed light on a theory of consciousness. Just as William James considered varieties of religious experience, we want to consider varieties of consciousness. We are often debating whether we think primarily in words or pictures and the answers vary a great deal. Thomas Grandin, of Colorado State University, in an online article (1998) (Ibid), discusses his primary method of thinking being pictorial. He quickly adds that this is because he is autistic. He gives the example of how he was able to think his way out of a car accident by his pictorial analysis: “The near-accident occurred in fairly light traffic on a sunny day while I was driving to the airport on Interstate highway 25. Cruising along at 70 miles per hour in the southbound lane, I suddenly saw a huge bull elk running full speed across the northbound lanes. I knew I had to react quickly to avoid hitting him. Instantly, three pictures appeared in my mind. Each picture represented the end result of an option available to me. The first picture was of a car rear-ending my car. I knew from experience that slamming on the brakes could cause this. The next picture was the elk smashing through my windshield. From my understanding of animal behavior, I knew that swerving or any sudden movement of my car might cause the elk to stop or slow down. The third picture was of the elk passing harmlessly in front of my car. In this picture I saw what would happen if I gently applied the brakes to slow down. These pictures were like the picture menus one can click on an Internet web page. They appeared in my mind one at a time, but all within one second. This was enough time for me to selectively compare the options and choose the slow down gradually picture. I immediately calculated the elk's trajectory and speed coming across the highway, and my speed and position in the southbound lane, and began to slowly apply the brakes. This choice prevented me from being rear ended, or having the elk crash through my windshield. The conscious choice was a visual process without the use of internal verbal dialog. At the moment I became aware of the elk crossing the northbound lane, I resisted the urge to 80 make a panic response and slam on the brakes. In just seconds, I evaluated the three pictures in my mind. To use computer jargon, I conducted a basic cost-benefit analysis of the options. After running a quick video like simulation of the elk passing harmlessly in front of my car, I simply clicked a mental mouse on the "slowing down gradually" picture. I made a conscious choice from visual simulations played in my mind”. Grandin goes on to say that it might take 0.5 secs to process a conscious reaction over an unconscious instinctive response. He also talks about the increasing complexity of consciousness notions from insects onwards: “Moving up the evolutionary ladder from insects, many biological scientists agree that mammals and birds have primary consciousness because they can process simultaneous stimuli and they have an internal representation of their experiences. Svene Sjolander states that a snake may not be conscious because it does not have a centralized representation of its prey. It seems to live in a world where a mouse is many different things. Sjolander explains that striking the mouse is controlled by vision; following the mouse after striking is controlled by smell; and swallowing the mouse is controlled strictly by touch. There is no integration of information from all the senses. Each sensory channel operates independently of the others. When a snake has a mouse held in its coils, it may still search for the mouse as if "the information from its body which is holding the prey did not exist." It appears that the snake has no ability to transfer information between sensory channels. Sjolander further explains that a snake has no ability to anticipate that a mouse running behind a rock will reappear. Cats and other predatory mammals are able to anticipate that the prey will reappear. According to Sjolander, snakes are therefore not conscious.” 81 (Diagram: conscious snake?) Now I am not sure his conclusion is justified, as a certain vagueness creeps in. Where can consciousness be said to begin if we agree that animals differ in degree but not kind? I do not have much difficulty in saying a stone is not conscious, although it may be hard to explain exactly why to a philosopher, but not to anyone of normal intelligence. A virus or bacteria also lack all neural structures, but once there is an actual brain we may be only dealing with degrees of consciousness from there on. So even the snake may possess consciousness, just at a degree we have not yet been able to define. Grandin states that because he himself lacks verbal abstraction he actually possesses a lower form of consciousness than people with language. Brutally honest he may be, but even within the realms of linguistically enabled people there are such vast differences that he does not need to be humble about it at all. The higher consciousness of an Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Russell, to name but a few, puts all of our higher brain functions to shame by comparison. In 1000 years time we may see significant evolution of consciousness. We shall perhaps come back to the idea of how our own culture i.e. humankind may have evolved over the 10,000 years we have been socialized, and whether there is a sense of an advancing consciousness. 82 Now we need to dive into some technicality and take a preliminary look at a number of neurological disorders which detract from consciousness in some way. Then we can gradually see “consciousness” as requiring all these functional substrata. We will start with the most recent part of the cortex, the frontal lobes. Frontal Lobe Syndrome is damage to the frontal lobes through tumour or more commonly head injury. Again this becomes part of the theory that consciousness is a functioning whole human being, with parts of the brain as sine quibus non for that functioning. Emotions, ability to perceive, reflect and act accordingly, ability to abstract, will all be part of the advanced consciousness. Add to that the ability to play, to imagine future and past experiences and recreate “in the mind’s eye” as well as to coordinate all of these functions together and we have human beings, but should we necessarily exclude animals from having these functions? I do not think so and we may not find any one animal with all, but we also find a large number of human beings with one or more aspect missing. So we have a hierarchy of consciousness. I am quite comfortable with that. We are not able to say any one disorder necessarily has a significant effect on altering consciousness or personhood but it may. 83 The frontal lobes are divided into Precentral cortex, prefrontal cortex and orbito-frontal cortex. These areas communicate with the thalamus, caudate nucleus, putamen, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus and septal areas. So the frontal lobes definitely have a pre-eminent communication with the limbic system. The rest of the complete cortex also has a two-way communication with the frontal lobes. Some have said this is the orchestra conductor. Luria, the great Russian physiologist, said that the frontal lobes “regulated” mental or cortical activities. The dorsolateral frontal cortex controls response inhibition, and patients with lesions in this area have disinhibition, emotional lability, in addition to memory problems. Frontal lobe lesions lead to personal neglect, sociopathy, emotional neutrality, lack of ambition, lack of attentiveness and lack of creativity. The most famous of these cases was over 100 years ago. Phineas Gage, a railway worker, sustained an iron rod though his frontal lobe and was not even unconscious with the injury. His personality was profoundly changed 84 however. Psychosurgery was popular in the last century but fell into disrepute after too many lobotomies were performed, many with quite disastrous results. However many patients with advanced paranoid schizophrenia were helped. Psychosurgery will almost certainly creep back in, with better ethical standards one hopes and less primitive methodology. The essential role of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness may be an absolute in the sense of a necessary pre-requisite to full consciousness. There is a certain element of pre-frontal self-awareness, emanating from this area, with a higher control ordering of anticipation, goal selection, monitoring of behaviour, i.e. feedback and self-criticism. In addition selectivity of material presented and control of reaction may all be higher cortical functions of the frontal lobe without with consciousness becomes meaningless. Add to that, that the functionality of lower levels of the brain is still necessary, especially the limbic system in general, and you can, see the start of a certain global concept of consciousness. We are attacking the notion that consciousness remains a mystery, bit by bit. Neurological disorders and their relationship to what consciousness may be and to what defines a person. We shall examine an eclectic number of disorders because I am building a case towards a theory of consciousness which involves knowing what full function might be. This list is not meant to be inclusive and only some of the disorders or deficits which may have an effect on consciousness, or the sense of person, are included. I will focus on diseases or conditions which appear directly related to specific functions as it might then become apparent what consciousness may be, in addition to a sense of personhood. I thank Wikipedia for some of these brief summaries of neurological disorders. Once again, I must apologize for that, but living 8 hours drive from good libraries, forces certain choices. The reason that there are so many complex disorders included here is simple. I should have put a far larger number. These are only some of the neurological disorders which directly have an effect on consciousness. Each 85 little defect (though not little to a patient) may alter and diminish the level of consciousness in that person, to the point that the definition of that human being as a person is called into question. Abarognosis: is a loss of the ability to detect the weight of an object held in the hand or to tell the difference in weight between two objects. This deficit may be caused by damage to the parietal lobe on the side of the brain opposite of the deficit. Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (ACC) is a rare birth defect (congenital disorder) in which there is a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum. Characteristics common in individuals with callosal disorders include vision impairments, low muscle tone, poor motor coordination, delays in sitting and walking, low perception of pain, delayed toilet training, and chewing and swallowing difficulties. Laboratory research has demonstrated that individuals with ACC have difficulty transferring more complex information from one hemisphere to the other. They also have been shown to have some cognitive disabilities (difficulty in complex problem solving) and social difficulties (missing subtle social cues), even when their Intelligence Quotient is normal. Recent research suggests that specific social difficulties may be a result of impaired face processing. Perhaps more interesting is that many of these children go on to essentially normal lives. Agnosia is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. This usually happens with strokes, dementia, or tumours, or infection, some are hereditary. The list of diseases or subdivisions of agnosia is extensive and includes: 86 Name Description Alexia Inability to recognize text. Akinetopsia The loss of motion perception. Alexithymia While not strictly a form of agnosia, Alexithymia may be difficult to distinguish from or co-occur with socialemotional agnosia. Alexithymia is deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions common to around 85% of people on the autism spectrum. Alexithymia is believed to be due to an information processing delay in the combined processing of information in the left and right hemispheres, resulting in poor differentiation between body messages and emotions. AmusiaReceptive amusia Is agnosia for music. It involves loss of the ability to recognize musical notes, rhythms, and intervals and the inability to experience music as musical. Anosognosia This is the inability to gain feedback about one's own condition and can be confused with lack of insight but is caused by problems in the feedback mechanisms in the brain. It is caused by neurological damage and can occur in connection with a range of neurological impairments but is most commonly referred to in cases of paralysis following stroke. Those with Anosognosia with multiple impairments may even be aware of some of their impairments but completely unable to perceive others. This is a critical loss 87 of function in consciousness. Apperceptive agnosia Apraxia Associative agnosia Patients are unable to distinguish visual shapes and so have trouble recognizing, copying, or discriminating between different visual stimuli. Unlike patients suffering from associative agnosia, those with apperceptive agnosia are unable to copy images. Apraxia is a form of motor (body) agnosia involving the neurological loss of ability to map out physical actions in order to repeat them in functional activities. It is a form of body-disconnectedness and takes several different forms: Speech-Apraxia in which ability to speak is impaired, Limb-Kinetic Apraxia in which there is a loss of hand or finger dexterity and can extend to the voluntary use of limbs. In Ideomotor Apraxia the gestures of others can't be easily replicated and patients are unable to execute goaldirected movements. Ideational Apraxia leads to an inability to work out which actions to initiate and struggles to plan and discriminate between potential gestures. Apraxia of Gait in which co-ordination of leg actions is problematic and it is difficult to kick a ball, Constructional Apraxia causes a person to be unable to co-ordinate the construction of objects or draw pictures or follow a design, Oculomotor Apraxia causes the ability to control visual tracking is impaired. Patients can describe visual scenes and classes of objects but still fail to recognize them. They may, for example, know that a fork is something you eat with but may mistake it for a spoon. Patients suffering from associative agnosia are still able to reproduce an image through 88 copying. Auditory agnosia With Auditory Agnosia there is difficulty distinguishing environmental and non-verbal auditory cues including difficulty distinguishing speech from non-speech sounds even though hearing is usually normal. Is associated with the inability to orient parts of the body, Autotopagnosia and is often caused by a lesion in the parietal part of the posterior thalamic radiations. Refers to the inability to recognize a color, while being Color agnosia able to perceive or distinguish it. I don't think Wittgenstein covered this one. Cortical deafness Refers to people who do not perceive any auditory information but whose hearing is intact. My wife says I suffer from this one. Is the inability to distinguish the fingers on the hand. It is Finger agnosia present in lesions of the dominant parietal lobe, and is a component of Gerstmann syndrome. Form agnosia Patients perceive only parts of details, not the whole object. Integrative In this disorder one has the ability to recognize elements of 89 agnosia something but yet be unable to integrate these elements together into comprehensible perceptual wholes. A very important constituent of normal functioning consciousness. One of the symptoms of Hemispatial neglect. Patients with Hemispatial neglect were placed so that an object was in their neglected visual field but a mirror reflecting that Mirror agnosia- object was visible in their non-neglected field. Patients could not acknowledge the existence of objects in the neglected field and so attempted to reach into the mirror to grasp the object. Pain Agnosia Also referred to as Analgesia, this is the difficulty in perceiving and processing pain; thought to underpin some forms of self injury. Phonagnosia Is the inability to recognize familiar voices, even though the hearer can understand the words used. Also known as faceblindness and facial agnosia: Patients Prosopagnosia cannot consciously recognize familiar faces, sometimes even including their own. This is often misperceived as an inability to remember names. Semantic agnosia Those with this form of agnosia are effectively 'object blind' until they use non-visual sensory systems to 90 recognise the object. For example, feeling, tapping, smelling, rocking or flicking the object, may trigger realisation of its semantics (meaning). Simultanagnosia Social emotional agnosia Patients can recognize objects or details in their visual field, but only one at a time. They cannot make out the scene they belong to or make out a whole image out of the details. They literally "cannot see the forest for the trees." Sometimes referred to as Expressive Agnosia, this is a form of agnosia in which the person is unable to perceive facial expression, body language and intonation, rendering them unable to non-verbally perceive people's emotions and limiting that aspect of social interaction. Agnosia or Astereognosia is connected to tactile sense that is, touch. Patient finds it difficult to recognize objects by touch based on its texture, size and weight. However, Somatosensory they may be able to describe it verbally or recognize same kind of objects from pictures or draw pictures of them. Thought to be connected to lesions or damage in somatosensory cortex. Tactile agnosia Impaired ability to recognize or identify objects by touch alone. Time agnosia Is the loss of comprehension of the succession and duration of events. This element of consciousness could be one of 91 the most critical in any distinction from other animals, who mostly live in the present moment. Patients with this somewhat rare disorder are most confused. This is a form of visual agnosia in which a person cannot rely on visual cues to guide them directionally due to the Topographical inability to recognise objects. Nevertheless, they may still agnosia have an excellent capacity to describe the visual layout of the same place. Verbal auditory This presents as a form of meaning 'deafness' in which agnosia hearing is intact but there is significant difficulty recognising spoken words as semantically meaningful. Is associated with lesions of the left occipital lobe and Visual agnosia temporal lobes. Many types of visual agnosia involve the inability to recognize objects. Difficulty comprehending the meaning of written words. Verbal agnosia The capacity to read is usually intact but comprehension is impaired. The Agnosias have been described in some detail, mainly because they represent such fundamental functional parts of “consciousness”. A few more general syndromes are described below, to add to the overall functional picture of consciousness. 92 Alien hand syndrome (also known as anarchic hand or Dr. Strangelove syndrome) is an unusual neurological disorder in which one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a mind of its own. AHS is best documented in cases where a person has had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically separated, a procedure sometimes used to relieve the symptoms of extreme cases of epilepsy. An alien hand sufferer can feel normal sensation in the hand and leg, but believes that the hand, while still being a part of their body, behaves in a manner that is totally distinct from the sufferer's normal behavior. They feel that they have no control over the movements of the 'alien' hand, but that, instead, the hand has the capability of acting autonomously — i.e., independent of their voluntary control. Alien behavior can be distinguished from reflexive behavior in that the former is flexibly purposive while the latter is obligatory. Sometimes the sufferer will not be aware of what the alien hand is doing until it is brought to his or her attention, or until the hand does something that draws their attention to its behavior. This is an interesting condition with relevance to "conscious will". Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which the patient responds to stimuli presented to one side of their body as if the stimuli had been presented at the opposite side. Thus a touch to the left arm will be reported as a touch to the right arm ("somatosensory allochiria"). If the auditory or visual modalities are affected, sounds (a person's voice for instance) will be reported as occurring on the opposite side to that on which they occur and objects presented visually will be reported as having been presented on the opposite side. Often, but not universally, patients may express allochiria in their drawing, copying in mirror image. The disorder comes from damage to the contralateral parietal lobe. Alzheimer's disease (AD) In the early stages, the most commonly recognised symptom is inability to acquire new memories, such as difficulty in recalling recently observed facts. As the disease advances, symptoms include confusion, irritability and aggression, mood swings, language breakdown, long-term memory loss, and the general withdrawal of the sufferer as their senses decline. Progressive deterioration eventually hinders 93 independence; with subjects being unable to perform most common activities of daily living. Speech difficulties become evident due to an inability to recall vocabulary, which leads to frequent incorrect word substitutions (paraphasias). Reading and writing skills are also progressively lost. Complex motor sequences become less coordinated as time passes and AD progresses, so the risk of falling increases. During this phase, memory problems worsen, and the person may fail to recognise close relatives. Longterm memory, which was previously intact, becomes impaired. Behavioural and neuropsychiatric changes become more prevalent. Common manifestations are wandering, irritability and labile affect, leading to crying, outbursts of unpremeditated aggression, or resistance to caregiving. Approximately 30% of patients develop illusionary misidentifications and other delusional symptoms. Subjects also lose insight of their disease process and limitations (anosognosia). Urinary incontinence can develop. During the last stage of AD, the patient is completely dependent upon caregivers. Language is reduced to simple phrases or even single words, eventually leading to complete loss of speech. Despite the loss of verbal language abilities, patients can often understand and return emotional signals. Although aggressiveness can still be present, extreme apathy and exhaustion are much more common results. Patients will ultimately not be able to perform even the most simple tasks without assistance. Muscle mass and mobility deteriorate to the point where they are bedridden, and they lose the ability to feed themselves. The basic “personhood” may indeed be totally lost. I had one patient who accused her husband (they were both in their late 70s) of having affairs because when she looked in a mirror she saw a strange woman she could not identify. The description of Alzheimer's Syndrome, though lengthy, is important as it is one of the best known, and seen, deteriorations of the whole consciousness and personality. Aphasia from the Greek root word "aphatos", meaning speechless, is an acquired language disorder in which there is an impairment of any language 94 modality. This may include difficulty in producing or comprehending spoken or written language. People with aphasia may experience any of the following behaviors due to an acquired brain injury, although some of these symptoms may be due to related or concomitant problems such as dysarthria or apraxia and not primarily due to aphasia. Apraxia refers to physical speech disorders. That is to say it is a disorder of motor planning. Aphasia refers more to the inability to produce or comprehend language. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • inability to comprehend language inability to pronounce, not due to muscle paralysis or weakness inability to speak spontaneously inability to form words inability to name objects poor enunciation excessive creation and use of personal neologisms inability to repeat a phrase persistent repetition of phrases paraphasia (substituting letters, syllables or words) agrammatism (inability to speak in a grammatically correct fashion) dysprosody (alterations in inflexion, stress, and rhythm) incompleted sentences inability to read inability to write limited verbal output difficulty in naming Auditory Processing Disorder (APD), also known as (Central) Auditory Processing Disorder ((C)APD) is an umbrella term for a variety of disorders that affect the way the brain processes auditory information. It is not a sensory (inner ear) hearing impairment; individuals with APD usually have normal peripheral hearing ability. However, they cannot process the information they hear in the same way as others do, which leads to difficulties in recognizing and interpreting sounds, especially the sounds 95 composing speech. Auditory Processing Disorder is a listening disability. It can be considered a processing disability. Binswanger's disease is a form of multi-infarct dementia caused by damage to the white brain matter. It differs from Alzheimer’s in that it is subcortical. Patients with this condition may have a normal memory but difficulty planning, thinking abstractly or inhibiting appropriate actions. Lower down in the anatomical divisions of the brain is the Pontine area and disorders in this area are still critical to consciousness. Central pontine myelinolysis is a neurologic disease caused by severe damage of the myelin sheath of nerve cells in the brainstem, more precisely in the area termed the pons. The most common cause is the rapid correction of low blood sodium levels hyponatremia).It has been observed following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Symptoms:- Frequently observed symptoms in this disorder are acute para- or quadraparesis, dysphagia, dysarthria, diplopia, loss of consciousness, and other neurological symptoms associated with brainstem damage. The patient may experience Locked-in Syndrome where cognitive function is intact, but all muscles are paralyzed with the exception of eye blinking. These result from a rapid myelinolysis of the corticobulbar and corticospinal tracts in the brainstem. We have looked at Locked-in Syndrome in more detail, elsewhere. Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease or CJD is a degenerative neurological disorder (brain disease) that is incurable and invariably fatal. It is the most common among the types of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy found in humans. The first symptom of CJD is rapidly progressive dementia, leading to memory loss, personality changes and hallucinations. This is accompanied by physical problems such as speech impairment, jerky movements (myoclonus), balance and coordination dysfunction (ataxia), changes in gait, rigid posture, and seizures. Dyscalculia or math disability is a specific learning disability or difficulty involving innate difficulty in learning or comprehending mathematics. It is akin to dyslexia and can include confusion about math symbols. Dyscalculia 96 can also occur as the result of some types of brain injury. Dyscalculia has been associated with lesions to the supramarginal and angular gyri at the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex. The following are but a few of the symptoms: • Difficulty with everyday tasks like checking change and reading analog clocks. • Inability to comprehend financial planning or budgeting, sometimes even at a basic level; for example, estimating the cost of the items in a shopping basket or balancing a checkbook. • Difficulty with multiplication-tables, and subtraction-tables, addition tables, division tables, mental arithmetic, etc. • May do fairly well in subjects such as science and geometry, which require logic rather than formulae, until a higher level requiring calculations is obtained. • Many of those who suffer from dyscalculia may have parents who perform well to excellent in Mathematics-related fields (such as architects, engineers, or math teachers), though this connection has yet to be genetically linked. • Difficulty with conceptualizing time and judging the passing of time. May be chronically late or early. • Particularly problems with differentiating between left and right. • Frequent difficulties with arithmetic, confusing the signs: +, −, ÷ and ×. Dysgraphia (or agraphia) is a deficiency in the ability to write, regardless of the ability to read, not due to intellectual impairment. People with dysgraphia usually can write on some level, and often lack other fine motor skills and may be cross dominant, finding tasks such as tying shoes difficult. It often does not affect all fine motor skills. They can also lack basic grammar and spelling skills (for example, having difficulties with the letters p, q, b, and d), and often will write the wrong word when trying to formulate 97 thoughts (on paper). This condition may be genetic or indeed from trauma, even in adults. Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, and/or rapid naming. Dyslexia is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5 and 17 percent of the population. Macropsia (also known as megalopia) is a neurological condition affecting human visual perception, in which objects within an affected section of the visual field appear larger than normal, causing the subject to feel smaller. Macropsia, along with its opposite condition, micropsia, can be categorized under dysmetropsia. Macropsia has a wide range of causes, from prescription and illicit drugs, to migraines and (rarely) complex partial epilepsy, and to different retinal conditions, such as epiretinal membrane. Physiologically, retinal macropsia results from the compression of cones in the eye. It is the compression of receptor distribution that results in greater stimulation and thus a larger perceived image of an object. The most obvious symptom of macropsia is the presence of exceptionally enlarged objects throughout the visual field. For example, a young girl might see her sister’s books as the same size as her sister. Stemming from this symptom, someone with macropsia may feel undersized in relation to his or her surrounding environment. Implications for consideration of levels of consciousness are obvious. Nonverbal learning disorder or nonverbal learning disability (NLD or NVLD) is a proposed condition characterized by a significant discrepancy between high verbal and lower performance scores on an IQ test, with deficits in motor, visual-spatial, and social skills. Some proponents of the category believe that this discrepancy is attributable to dysfunction in the right cerebral hemisphere. 98 NLD involves deficits in perception, coordination, socialisation, non-verbal problem-solving and understanding of humour, along with well-developed rote memory. As most people with Asperger’s syndrome (AS) fit the criteria for NLD, a diagnosis of AS is often preferred. The basic Autism Spectrum Disorder is a disease of social interaction. Linguistic and cognitive development are intact and, indeed, often above normal. Palinopsia (Greek: palin for "again" and opsia for "seeing") is a visual disturbance that causes images to persist to some extent even after their corresponding stimulus has left. These images are known as afterimages and occur in persons with normal vision. However, a person with palinopsia experiences them to a significantly greater degree, to the point where they become difficult or impossible to ignore. This often results in mild to severe anxiety and/or depression. Palinopsia sometimes appears on its own, but is more often accompanied by other visual disturbances such as visual snow, and can be attributed to a number of conditions affecting the brain including medications, seizure disorders, tumors, occipital lobe or visual pathway lesions, subcortical hemorrhage, and dural arteriovenous malformations. Synesthesia—is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in ordinal linguistic, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (threedimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise). For example a patient with OLP (Ordinal-linguistic personification) may see numbers as coloured and having personalities and letters also. There may be 99 a deficit in the cross-activation pathways, actually sometimes a failure to have eradicated certain pathways from birth. We now consider some different kinds of disorders. Disorders that are more metabolic in origin:- We have seen from the above, many disorders that affect consciousness in various ways and, once again, we see what mechanisms therefore constitute consciousness. Yet one whole area sometimes omitted from consideration of consciousness is the issue of body metabolism. So this is illustrated below by endocrine, or chemical, disorders. Hyperadrenocorticism or hypercorticism or Cushing's syndrome is a hormone (endocrine) disorder caused by high levels of cortisol (hypercortisolism) in the blood. This can be caused by taking glucocorticoid drugs, or by tumors that produce cortisol or adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). Cushing's syndrome is not confined to humans and is also a relatively common condition in domestic dogs and horses. Patients frequently suffer various psychological disturbances, ranging from euphoria to psychosis. Depression and anxiety are also common. This is an example of chemical balance disorder but illustrates the need for functioning anatomy as well as internal chemistry for full consciousness and intact personhood. Menkes disease (MNK), also called Menkes syndrome, copper transport disease, steely hair disease, is a disorder that affects copper levels in the body, leading to copper deficiency. It is an x-linked recessive disorder, and is therefore considerably more common in males: females require two defective alleles to develop the disease. MNK is characterized by sparse and coarse hair, growth failure, and deterioration of the nervous system. Onset of Menkes syndrome typically begins during infancy. Signs and symptoms of this disorder include weak muscle tone (hypotonia), sagging facial features, seizures, mental retardation, and developmental delay. Of note for our purpose is that something as seemingly unrelated as serum copper levels would affect levels of consciousness and sense of personhood. 100 Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome (Non-24) is a chronic circadian rhythm sleep disorder. It can be defined as "a chronic steady pattern comprising oneto two-hour daily delays in sleep onset and wake times in an individual living in society." The pattern of delay persists literally "around the clock," typically taking a few weeks to complete one cycle. People with Non-24 "resemble free-running, normal individuals living in a time-isolation facility with no external time cues." In people with this disorder, the body essentially insists that the day is longer than 24 hours and refuses to adjust to the external light/dark cycle. It is far more common in blind people than in sighted people. It causes major disruptions in their ability to function, jobs, holidays, daylight saving changes etc. Schizophrenia is a behavioural disorder characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction. Onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood. Unusually high dopamine activity in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain has been found in people with schizophrenia. It is commonly, and mistakenly in my opinion, called a “mental disease” but should be considered a disease of a person as a whole. We have mentioned above under Cushing's Disease, the importance of certain chemicals. It may be of interest here to mention the main neurotransmitters that we currently know about and the roles they play in emotions and consciousness. They are discussed, not necessarily in order of importance.: Serotonin:- this chemical has an effect on mood, sleep, appetite and is involved in several mood disorders e.g. depression, anxiety and bipolar affective disorder. It is perhaps the major player among neurotransmitters. Dopamine:- Dopamine can affect movement cognition, pleasure and motivation. It is produced mostly in the Substantia Nigra and thus affects 101 Parkinson's Disease, as mentioned elsewhere. Not only does it affect motion but a lack of this one chemical in certain parts of the brain appears to be linked causally to ideation diseases, delusions and psychosis. Glutamic Acid and Gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA:Memorising and learning are affected by differing levels of this neurotransmitter. It has wide-reaching effects in such diseases as Alzheimer's and ALS. There are others such as acetylcholine and epinephrine/nor epinephrine which also play an important role in more fundamental parts of consciousness, anxiety, movement, stress response etc. Summary: I am sorry to burden the reader with so many horrendous diseases, many of which, I myself, as a physician, have never come across. However the point of this extensive list is to see into the "mind" and consciousness of human beings. I wish to illustrate the immense substrate of consciousness, both anatomical and biochemical. Each and every one of these disorders, and the many further neurological disorders, illustrate what is needed for normal functioning of a full consciousness. It is not a complete description of consciousness by any means, yet these disorders show the fundamental functioning blocks. By studying these annoying and sometimes fatal and terrible disorders, we can see in fact the normal functional elements of consciousness and personhood in an incredibly detailed way. We are solving what makes up a human being by seeing the sum total of mechanisms that can go wrong. Until they do fail we have not been able to note that there was a mechanism for this particular function. Many of these are genetic, and in the future, cures may come from stem cell implantation. Some diseases seen here involve anatomical injury, some chemical imbalance, both of which are critical substrates of consciousness. We cannot easily separate physical states from “mental” conditions or “mental” functions. This has been done too much in the past, and in medicine we need a far closer relationship between psychiatric medicine and 102 the rest of the medical studies. A simple change in my blood sugar can radically alter my “consciousness”, and so can my thyroid hormone levels or circulating cortisol levels. They are all part of what creates the harmonious total of consciousness. Consciousness becomes the sum total of a normal functional brain and these elements above are just part of the actual constituents of consciousness. We can see clearly the enormous complexity of the notion of consciousness, but we begin to remove some of the unfathomable mystery. Consciousness only has meaning and comprehension in the context of a living being. It will not become objectively pinned down outside of the life of a perceiving being. It is a composite concept of certain living beings and it then requires many structures and chemical balances to be in place. How far into the animal kingdom we extend the concept remains to be seen, but has been part of this investigation. Future research will undoubtedly tease out more and more of the elements of full consciousness and philosophers will once again fade into the background somewhat. This happened with theories of matter, but there is still a place for philosophers to inject clarity into discussions and help scientists avoid pitfalls. One of the most important areas is in naming. There is such a profound difference between a simple empirical object, such as a parietal lobe and a concept such as thinking. The existence of a parietal lobe is hard to question. The existence and nature of "a thought" is quite different. The philosopher's role in ontological clarity is crucial. Now whether a machine could ever be “conscious” is an interesting question but I think we still have the massive number of neurons and the plasticity and variability to make it very hard for anyone to construct a machine that does more than have us say “oh cute”. So far we have not, but I am sure we will build biological or DNA, or quantum based computers that will enable robots to become almost conscious, at least from the observers point of view! The mention of just one of these disorders "Time Agnosia" where the patient has a neurological deficit affecting their ability to judge the passage of time, is particularly interesting. Time has mostly been considered to be of 103 two varieties, firstly general clock-calendar time or Relativistic mathematical space-time continuum. Such a patient will have a very localised neurological deficit, intact in all other ways, so a very small area of cerebral infarction. Time for philosophers has generally been considered "Newtonian" in the sense of an objective flow of events in the external world. Events would be considered as following one another, and time itself is measurable. This corresponds to the clock-calendar time mentioned above. The relativistic notions of time, do not generally apply in human experience, so we can consider that our own biological adaptation has been to sidereal time. That is to say we have probably adapted our brains to deal with variations in daylight and earth's rotation and may have internalized this into somewhere in the limbic system, or more specifically to the suprachiasmatic nuclei, as well as in the temporal or parietal lobes. Dopamine and norepinephrine may also play a role in our ability to judge time. To think, then, that such a precious concept as time, comes down also to the normal functioning of consciousness, is certainly humbling. In the human being, we can dispense with the philosophical notion of the impossibility of present time and simply accept the concept of a present moment. We can, as it were, arrest nature. Physicists, especially quantum physicists, are stuck with being unable to assume a before and after and do not have an arrow of time. We, as non-physicists, definitely do. But it may be that Immanuel Kant was correct in assuming that such perceptions are entirely man-made. 104 Diagram: SCN, the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus. Although in general it is dangerous and presumptuous to localize function in any one small area, the SCN is particularly in control of circadian rhythm. It has evolved to operate on a 24 hour cycle in general but in fact is 24h 11mins. It received input directly from the retina and communicates with the visual cortex and also the pineal gland, where it assists in regulating body temperature and various hormones, such as melatonin and cortisol. This brief look at time concludes the description of the apparatus required for consciousness, the substrate of consciousness. I have omitted a discussion of hallucinogenic drugs, largely through lack of personal experience, but it is feasible that in opening the sensory apparatus wider, the person undergoing such an experience is negating the “forgetting” function of the cortex. Thereby he or she sees far more and experiences far more detail on simple objects of perception. Given that we are yet only using a small amount of our brain potential most of the day and night, it is feasible that mind-altering drugs do increase our potential to view “reality”. The price to pay may be that the brain is designed to forget so much, as a sanity saving device, and return us to a somewhat mundane level of “normal” functioning. In a sense we are describing what constitutes “normal” 105 consciousness. It is not my intention to get into the multiple aspects of “higher” or “enhanced” consciousness. Some of the described disorders do in fact lead to heightened awareness or consciousness and then again it may be induced by certain drugs. Yet my point is that “normal” consciousness requires a great deal of inhibition of these pathways to increased consciousness and thus the topic remains to be examined in other studies. We will now take a look at the more philosophical aspects of mind, consciousness and the difficult issue of self-awareness. 106 Chapter XI Mind-v-Consciousness and the subject-object issue. We have not really delved into a discussion of "Mind" per se, preferring to deal with consciousness, but some points can be made. The issues of what defines a person is serious, medically, legally and philosophically. Personhood is defined in various ways and does not seem to contain the necessity for a full functioning "Mind". Mind itself is a somewhat nefarious term which has so many connotations as to make it almost an annoying concept. Personally I would like to see it abolished, not mind itself, just the concept. OK that's a paradox and contradiction. Let's just say the concept of mind may have become superfluous in today's scientific world. It may not be quite that simple however, and there still may be a need for a distinction between mind, consciousness, and personality. An article by Susan Greenfield in The British Journal of Psychiatry (2002) 181:91-93 titled "Mind, brain and consciousness" offers some opinions. She feels that "mind" is what it feels like to be yourself whereas "personality" is how others see us. The distinction remains blurred in my mind! "Mind" may be like "The Unconscious" i.e. a phenomenological invention of dubious ontological status, but of cultural utility. We just need not fall into the trap of believing that nouns refer to existent entities. "Goodness" and "Justice" and many other examples fall into the category of useful noun concepts that do not imply existence. I can describe what I might mean by "Justice" by examples and description but I need not imply that there is any such existent entity. "Mind" may be seen this way and it serves a cultural and linguistic purpose then. Of course we do create a virtual reality of the outside world inside our perceptive world and this Kantian notion does lend support to the unknowability of the "Ding-An-Sich", as it is often referred to. In the evolution of language, it was probably a long time before we evolved away from all nouns referring to “things”. So mind may be more of a descriptive aid that will continue to serve us whereas consciousness becomes the more concrete concept of a physiological nature and an object of study. 107 The notion of subjective awareness that there is somehow an executive in control of this consciousness i.e. "me" is most probably one of those linguistic delusions or category errors that Gilbert Ryle described. Wittgenstein's notion of Language Games is of use here, as many different language games may be in process of being played when we discuss such complex concepts. The so-called "Hard Problem" of subjective awareness or self-reflectivity remains exactly that, hard and perhaps even insoluble, but we really should not permit the problem as stated to completely block lateral thinking on the issue. Mysterians, led by Colin McGinn, argue that the human mind at present, is incapable of solving this problem. This is an attractive viewpoint, as we are undoubtedly evolving over the centuries, yet there may be, for a long time yet, the barrier of explaining "Qualia", or inner sensations, like pain from toothache, the taste of wine. And this is where the hard problem comes in. I cannot really ever experience how wine tastes to you. So Qualia are very personal, known only to my own subjective consciousness, seemingly incommunicable to others. In many series of colour testing pilots in my medical office, I find perhaps 20% with significant colour blindness, so I am quite aware that they are not seeing the same world out there as mine. They read different numbers out of the colour charts. So the explanatory gap between private sensations and other minds is indeed a real one. Is the red traffic light really red if only 80% of the population see it as "red". I see it as red, but I it is hard to imagine what it is you are seeing if you misread the colour charts. I really don't think the colour blind person says "oh the top light just changed from off to brown, but wait a minute that is what they call red, so I must stop". The answer is simpler. The facts are that the colour blind person actually sees "red", it just isn't the same red that most of us see! Now that is tricky for a philosopher. But it is just a matter of distinctions that an artist who works with many different shades, will appreciate, where I am unable to. 108 Physicists and physiologists tend to a mechanistic understanding of colour. In this, the colours are objective and a property of objects in the world. That is to say, they are not simply invented or constructed by our perceptive apparatus, though they may be perceived differently by different subjects. A person learns a given colour by paradigm examples. So it is hue, saturation, and lightness which will then alter one's perception of colour. The exact role of the perceiver may be more complex than stated here but as to the many theories of colour, we really do not need to dwell on them here. The whole issue of "seeing" and colours is quite complex of course and we can only hope to touch on a few issues of relevance here. Many years ago, when first reading the Philosophical Investigations, I wrote a short article "On Seeing", which I do not have anymore. It concerned the multiple uses of the phrase. Specifically it dealt with "Seeing without seeing". A propos here is the notion of Eidetic Memory, a somewhat controversial subject. Stephen Wiltshire, an architect in the U.K. has apparently such an extensive photographic memory, that he was taken on a helicopter flight, and, after landing, was able to draw, with pretty well every detail, the complete London landscape. So did he register in any way at the time, all this detail? Did he in fact "see" it? If you can see something with no conscious registration, at the time, of "seeing" it, and then recall the item perfectly later, we do have a new meaning of the word "see". Perhaps it makes sense to say that you can "see" without "seeing". Maybe it is unconscious seeing. Now we do not want an interminable philosophical discussion here, but it does illustrate the richness of language and the immense subtlety and complexity of consciousness. "Seeing in one's mind's eye", is a perfectly acceptable and comprehensible expression. We also see things with our eyes closed, not just after images. The fact that my Qualia may be different than yours does not mean that they both did not originate from the same source, it just refers to the link between subjective experience and the outside world (and by that I would include the amazing colours generated by pressure on the eyeball). We do not really need to worry too much about the actual real world source of all qualia. In other words it is a loose connection. The explanatory gap 109 may be examined further by taking the question of qualia or senseperception as a physical sensation (wherever it may occur) and then we are either paying attention to it or not. So there may be a colour patch generated by pressure and I may be aware of all the colours or in fact I may ignore all but green for whatever reason. So now I may not be conscious of the qualia at all. I might recall it under hypnosis (another very complex subject for philosophers!). So sometimes our internal world indicates something real and empirical and sometimes it indicates something completely imaginary. Colour vision itself presents a minefield for philosophers. Colour blindness is mostly genetic and possibly even of some evolutionary advantage, it is, as mentioned above, quite common at lesser levels. Classified on clinical appearance, color blindness can be total or partial. Total color blindness is less common than partial color blindness. There are two major types of color blindness: those who have difficulty distinguishing between red and green, and those who have difficulty distinguishing between blue and yellow. Being weak on green is the most common form of colour blindness. A darker shade of green would be called black. 110 An Ishihara test number-: most people will see 74, those with basic red/green deficiency will see perhaps 21, a person with total colour blindness will not see a number. It is important to note that a red apple does not simply look "green" to someone with red/green deficiency, a red apple will look very faded and similarly a green apple will be very faded. Such a person may not be able to distinguish the red traffic light from an amber light and a green light might look dirty white. Does this affect our philosophical arguments? Well we need to dive back into private sensations or qualia. Let's take the taste of lemon. Do I know what lemon tastes like? Well sure, but how would I tell you? "Well it is kind of bitter but with a delicious tinge to it". Yes but that might indicate a hundred different things. It will still be difficult to get someone else to identify lemon from any description we can come up with. How did we "learn" the taste of lemon in the first place. Presumably my parents fed me something lemony and said "this is lemon". After a few meals I would learn it. But the only way I can indicate to anyone else is never going to be dependent solely on my private sensation, but I will use that pathway of neurons and cerebral cortex memory circuit to assist me in indicating to someone else what lemon is like. I will still ultimately need a lemon or 111 lemon juice to assist in teaching. The point to make here is that I can never use the private language, it is just that- private. What is public is what we share in the world. Lemon taste is easier than a feeling, but I still need more than language to describe the lemon. With feelings it is almost impossible in spoken language, to convey my inner meaning. So if I feel sad, I might just say "I feel sad" and you might believe me, but you are more likely to believe me if I now compose or play a really "sad" piece of music that affects your feelings deeply. Good, so there are ways around the impasse, just not linguistic. There are people that see numbers as colours and can do amazing mathematics with a feeling of redness. Again the sense of language is being extended. We, as philosophers are so locked into words. Wittgenstein says:- ""In my own case I know that when I say 'I have pain' this utterance is accompanied by something:- but is it also accompanied by something in another man?" In as much as his utterance needn't be accompanied by my pain I may say he isn't accompanied by anything" ( Ludwig Wittgenstein "Philosophical Occasions" Edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Hackett Publishing Company 1993, p 206. ) We can flit from qualia to qualia here in thinking through this process, there are some differences between sensations caused by outside events and internally generated feelings, but the problem of conveying them is similar in some ways. The sensations derived more specifically from the external world are closer to Russell's objects of acquaintance, or sense-data. However with feelings, we need to consider the cultural milieu of the speaker and then the poetry, music, gestures, dance etc will convey what it means to have a certain feeling to another, at least well enough. With sensations there is the addition that although they can arise spontaneously with no link to the external world, things such as colour and sounds generally relate to a colour or sound "out there". It need not be the same one I am naming, for that depends on many things. So we are saying there are ways around the impasse that Wittgenstein may well have been implying in his doctrine of "showing" as opposed to 112 pedantic teaching. It is possible that this is what created the big problem as to how one could ever understand Wittgenstein if you were not one of his students. I had the pleasure to be, at least for a while, taught by one of his students, Dr M O'C Drury in Dublin and also to have contact with Rush Rhees, another of his “acolytes”. In some of their private correspondence, now coming to light at the University of Limerick (courtesy of the Drury family and Professor John Hayes) I found several references to their realization that future generations might not understand him from any later published works. The "Tractatus" was different, but Wittgenstein was quite reticent to publish anything else in his lifetime. I always found that frustrating, but anyone who isn't extremely frustrated by Wittgenstein has not really started to understand him. So the implication again is that you needed to have been a student and have become an acolyte. Now this may mean that Wittgenstein failed in his mission to teach the world a new way of doing philosophy but it may still mean that we have to read between the lines a little more. His doctrine of showing may be his most subtle. We are of course, playing with the notion of "Language Games" as introduced by Wittgenstein in his work in the 1930s, but we want to extend the notion to a complete cultural milieu to comprehend meaning in a wider sense than Wittgenstein spelled out, but which he may well have been trying to show us. The Language Games idea is just a tool to help us to think more clearly. We have to get very comfortable with vagueness in language and the ability to proceed without clear definitions of "things" or concepts. G.E.Moore in his lecture notes from the early thirties, records that Wittgenstein gave one lecture a week for years and then met later in the week with the students, to discuss. He remarked to Moore that it was a good job Moore was taking notes as otherwise if he was to die there would be no record of his thoughts. Moore mentions some fascinating points about Wittgenstein's "new method" of doing philosophy in the same "Philosophical Occasions:“Wittgenstein "went on to say that, though philosophy had now been "reduced to a matter of skill", yet this skill, like other skills, is very difficult 113 to acquire. One difficulty was that it required a "sort of thinking" to which we are not accustomed and to which we have not been trained--a sort of thinking very different from what is required in the sciences. And he said that the required skill could not be acquired merely by hearing lectures: discussion was essential. As regards his own work, he said it did not matter whether his results were true or not: what mattered was that 'a method had been found'." ( Ludwig Wittgenstein "Philosophical Occasions", p 113.) Again to further elucidate that which Moore certainly found surprising, i.e. that we now wanted skilful philosophers as opposed to "great" philosophers, Moore writes in his notes (ibid pp 113-4) "He did not try to expressly tell us what the "new method" which had been found was. But he gave some hints [27] (sic) as to its nature. He said, in [11] (sic) that the new subject consisted in "something like putting in order our notions as to what can be said about the world", and compared this to the tidying up of a room where you have to move the same object several times before you can get the room really tidy. He said also that we were "in a muddle about things", which we had to try to clear up; that we had to follow a certain instinct which leads us to ask certain questions, that we don't even understand what these questions mean; that are asking them results from "a vague mental uneasiness", like that which leads children to ask "why"; and that this uneasiness can only be cured "either be showing that a particular question is not permitted, or by answering it"." Moore goes on to say (page 114 PO) "I ought, perhaps, finally to repeat what I said in my first article (P. 51)", (sic), namely that he held that though the "new subject" must say a great deal about language, it was only necessary for it to deal with those points about language which have led, or are likely to lead, to definite philosophical puzzles or errors. I think he certainly thought that some philosophers now-a-days have been misled into dealing with linguistic points which have no such bearing, and the discussion of which therefore, in his view, forms no part of the proper business of a philosopher." 114 This little aside, above, leads to the way ahead from Wittgenstein, and to possible solutions to seemingly impossible problems, by demonstrating that they may indeed be pseudo-problems. David Chalmers, in his classic paper from 1995: Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), 1995, pp. 200-219 “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, outlines the easy problems of consciousness as the following: • the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; • the integration of information by a cognitive system; • the reportability of mental states; • the ability of a system to access its own internal states; • the focus of attention; • the deliberate control of behavior; • the difference between wakefulness and sleep. Chalmers adds that the above problems are amenable, or will be, to scientific study and neurophysiology in particular. The “Hard” problem on the other hand, is the subjective experience of consciousness or experience. This might mean the visual experience of redness in an object, but it means it in the sense of awareness of this sensation, the self-reflective aspect. I am simply a conscious creature, to add that "I know I am a conscious creature" adds a level of removal which then creates the "Hard" problem. Consciousness is an explicable phenomenon. We need a lot more science to "understand" it better and we may reach certain barriers, such as science has reached in theories of matter, time, cosmic explanations, but I do not feel that this one has to be such a barrier. As Chalmers says further in his article, we seem to be able to access more of our inner goings on. Chalmers states it thus: 115 ”Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery.” Part of my point here is that we may well be wrong in creating, or asking about, the "Hard Question" and creating the stumbling block, and perhaps there are other questions that can be asked to let us move on with the subject. Let us look at the immensely complex brain we have been painting a picture of and also the neurological deficits which cause many visual illusions, hallucinations, etc. We then realize then that we do create our total image of the world in this very complex brain. Qualia may be taken as subjective but they do not need to imply that there is not a measurable physiological process taking place. It certainly does not need to entail any notion of duality, nor indeed the subject-object dichotomy. No, I will never be able to feel your pain, nor you mine, but the grammar of pain is the problem here not the implied propositional status. The next line of inquiry takes us into language and the supposed, or theoretical, origins of thought. Discursive Language or verbal language, which should be seen strictly as a subdivision of symbolic expression, is of critical importance as our window into consciousness. The whole issue of symbolic expression may be the subject of a future investigation, following on from the works of Susanne Langer, but for now we will focus on language and the evolution of that form of expression. 116 Chapter XII The history of Language and the role of Language in Consciousness. Some indication of the role of language in thinking and in the notion of evolution of consciousness can be inferred from the history of language. Many years ago, I spent several years working in the High Arctic of Canada. My time with the Inuit taught me a great deal about non-verbal communication. The Inuit do not waste too much time on unnecessary verbalization. A child will indicate yes by raising his/her eyebrows, and no by simply scrunching the nose. Little head movements speak volumes and many visits to nearby houses were conducted with long periods of silence. It took a while to get used to this and gradually I began to realize that we waste an awful amount of time on superficial verbosity. What we do need to examine now is the evolution of language in our species and then also in the individual and look at comparative philology to see if we can draw conclusions about the nature of consciousness as a biological entity. The Australopithecine, one of the two early species of hominids, flourished in the diminishing African forest but appears not to have had the development of speech. As Fischer in "A History of Language" (Reaktion Books Ltd. 1999) mentions, these were "Walking Great Apes" but not "Talking Great Apes". Again I owe much of this chapter to Fischer's book. Fischer states that "The physical attributes for human articulate speech appear to have evolved rather quickly, between 1.6 million and 400,000 years ago. From the latter date comes our earliest hominid fossil indicating a possible use of vocal speech. This possible use emerged with a wholly new species of hominid Homo Erectus". Homo Erectus appears to have developed a complex form of planning, as is evidenced by tools and dietary remains, indicating that this species may have constructed bamboo-log rafts 117 and crossed a 17 km strait in Java. So approximately 1 million years ago an earlier species of human may have developed a form of syntax with conditional sentences such as "If we do this, then this may result". This may not have come with vocal speech as we know it, because the control of exhalation was not yet present. Let us not forget, at this juncture, that we have already seen a highly developed mammal whose level of consciousness may have been higher than any ancestor of ours at a time many million years before the above example. Around 350,000 BCE (Before Current Era) we find human remains with evidence of brain size having reached modern proportions. Homo Sapiens, as we know, began to exist around this time but Neandertals still existed also, only becoming extinct 30,000 years ago and with some evidence, from modern DNA testing, of interbreeding. The origin and evolution of human speech does require that certain anatomical features of speech organs as well as certain brain developments evolved. These evolved pari-passu with the advancement of gestures interestingly enough, according to experts. We do not know how or why this happened but it seems to have been necessary. We can have occasion here to mention the infamous gesture by Piero Sraffa, the economist. Sraffa was a contemporary of Wittgenstein' at Cambridge and was a member of an informal coffee group, consisting of Wittgenstein, Frank Ramsey, and John Maynard Keynes. Apparently they discussed economic theory and probability. However it is in legend that Wittgenstein was talking about the necessity of a proposition having the same logical form as that which it describes (a peculiar notion developed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). Sraffa made, what appears to be an extremely rude gesture and asked Wittgenstein "What is the logical form of that?" From this and other doubts Wittgenstein changed his view on the relation of propositions to the external world. 118 (Diagram: who needs speech! ) The Neandertals went through some interesting evolution, seemingly due to ice age adaptation around 180,000 BCE. They changed from tall and thin, to stocky and barrel-chested, an adaptation to cold. Neandertal man may have had speech ability close to later Homo Sapiens, but only gradually did the complex syntax of words referring to other words evolve. Words such as "to" and "which" and "because" are well beyond the toddler straight reference. They would be called "Relational Words". However between 50,000 and 30,000 BCE the Neandertals became extinct while Homo Sapiens developed better tools and better clothing, and base camps for hunting. But modern Homo Sapiens emerged before that, at about 120,000 BCE when the big ice wall covering Europe retreated. The beginnings of culture, i.e. art and maybe music date from say 100,000 BCE. Language truly started developing only around 30,000 BCE. Social groups of hominids ruled in small bands, perhaps a radius of 40-50 Kms, but language disseminated fast and furious with many dialects and perhaps as many as a thousand languages by 14,000 BCE. Shortly after a major warming 12,000 years ago we developed a form of grain, Triticum Dicoccum or emmer and modern farming society began. Written Language: Written language first emerged (as opposed to pure referential art) as a trading tool. Keeping tallies and being able to label, came before poetry, literature and philosophy, sad to say. The act of writing may indeed, have been seen as a magical process and the scribe possessed of such powers. The 119 effect on human evolution, for our purposes, has been immense, in a period of just over say 5000 years. Significant advances were the original hieroglyphs, followed by small clay disks and then reed styli, to engrave on pots. One of the most advanced, the early Egyptian script used about 2,500 glyphs which graphically represented the object to be named. Consonants developed long before vowels. Egyptian hieroglyphs were generally written with ink on papyrus or on leather or pottery. Writing changed from pictorial shapes to characters and by about 2000 BC we had a Coptic or early Greek alphabet. The cuneiform script developed from the Sumerian-Akkadian culture of the Middle East and was widespread, influencing even the Indus Valley languages. However the West Semitic script gradually took over and generated Arabic, Manchu, Syrian, Aramaic and Pahlavi, as well as Brahmi and others in southern Asia. It would seem that the world's oldest alphabetic script dates at around 1600 BC from the area of modern Israel. The early Greeks were the first to incorporate vowels (from their spoken language) into the older Phoenician script. Somewhere in this process we went from direct representation to abstraction, this evolution was of critical importance. In developing a theory of consciousness we need to examine the way words and concepts have developed over the millennia. Obviously if a word does not need to point to an object, or an idea, which needs to exist, then we can develop many concepts, which may be so abstract as to lead us astray in the sense that we may think they still represent something which they do not. So philosophical concepts such as "thinking about thinking" may be pure linguistic nonsense. The concept of self-awareness might need very careful analysis to become meaningful. You may well be asking, at this stage, why we are working through the history of spoken and written language. Well, it is mainly to see if we can parallel cultural development with the rise of "consciousness" in humans as our tools and brains evolved. We cannot say at what point we became conscious, thinking human beings, but obviously it occurred somewhere in this evolution, and not suddenly. But we have seen that the separation of object and idea have been fundamental. The philosophical implications, i.e. 120 that this was simply a natural evolution of language, not entailing any ontological implications, have not been clearly spelled out in philosophy often enough. Wittgenstein, in his picture theory in the "Tractatus" was entranced by the feeling that a word and object were closely related. Language moved past that a long time ago. The Greeks adopted a basic alphabet but made critical innovations and adapted the Semitic language to Indo-European by adding vowels to written language, this increased the transmission of thought. By adding individual sounds to certain 8th or 9th century BC Phoenician sounds they created the full Greek alphabet, from which all of Eastern and Western Europe and most of North America derive their current written language. Asiatic and Meso-American scripts appeared to have developed as primarily object names but then Chinese writing created up to 2500 glyphs from pictograms, and may have been used between 1000-2000 BC. The intricacies of these scripts, and Japanese, fall outside of our purposes and any comments on the relevance of thought processes to their scripts would have to be left to another analyst. Writing in Central America developed between 700 BC and 1200 BC and culminated in the Maya script. The lovely collection in the Royal Mayan Library was totally destroyed by the barbaric behaviour of the Spanish invaders, yet one further example of our "advanced cultural status" as humans. So virtually all languages begin as object depiction and then scripts become pictographic. It evolves to "logographic" with glyphs standing for objects (no longer directly pictorial) and ideas as well. We then advance to "syllabic" writing which shortens the glyphs basically and finally we have alphabetic. The picture has gone and we have vowels and consonants but still phonetic in so many ways. The last point we can make from Fischer's lovely book is that all writing systems fail ultimately to reproduce what we are capable of saying in speech. Intonation, stress on different parts of a word (desert, dessert, for example, say it both ways!), and other factors cause the English alphabet to 121 come up short, whereas Chinese script expresses far more that way. Suffice it to say we do not know the exact connection between different languages and the ability to think philosophically in a specific language. Nor do we know exactly at what point actual use of language gives us the conclusion that consciousness has now reached the level that we can say there is in any way a universal standard of consciousness. So consciousness will differ in the infant to the young child, to the adult. It will be markedly different between adults, such that we may doubt its existence in some, but there will also be variations within the individual that will alter it significantly. There will be differences between cultures and races. Yet there is a connection between maturity of language, spoken and written and consciousness. Similarly, we do not need to examine here all the non-discursive methods of transmission of information. They have also matured with evolution, and consciousness has developed with the poetry, music, dance and other forms of emotional and intellectual expression. For further and a detailed examination of that whole area, read Suzanne Langer’s later books. I will now try to bring together some of the differing topics in the book so far and look at neurophenomenology and the notion that consciousness has evolved. 122 Chapter XIII Conclusions and comments on Neurophenomenology, and the "Evolution" of Consciousness. In what sense can we talk about the evolution of consciousness? Well quite simply in fact. Human beings have evolved, brains have evolved. Consciousness is a direct emergent biological property of this development. We have seen that we can describe it as a collection of functioning neurological connections and areas in a healthy human being, i.e. with regards to metabolic and organ function. We have looked at various more primitive forms of consciousness, both in other animals and in Homo Sapiens. So then how have we evolved? Firstly:- the complexity of modern thinking, not just in the sense of scientific advances, but also the advances in abstract and conceptual thinking, are signs of changing consciousness. The development of advanced thought, associated with subtle changes in language structure, are part of that evolution. The paths through Relativity and Quantum mathematics and the subtleties of modern mathematical logic all indicate great advances in thinking. Presumably the brain itself is still evolving and thus consciousness will alter over generations to come. Consciousness is not evolving by natural selection alone, anymore, but rather by cultural spread through art, poetry, dance, cinema etc and not just by any genetic means. It is evolving more by cultural influences which may be hundreds of years even thousands, apart. The substrate is also, presumably, still evolving. Where human consciousness does need to evolve, at this stage in our evolution, is away from arrogant anthropocentricity. The notion that in this small galaxy, in the middle of myriads of other galaxies, this one small creature living for only an instant, when seen through astronomical and cosmological viewpoints, was of any singular importance, is simply ridiculous. Hypnosis and the "The Unconscious Mind " are both concepts we will be closer to understanding as we do more research. I do not have any 123 difficulty in seeing them incorporated into a biological theory. Focusing, concentration, attention and ignoring are all mechanisms functioning within the concept of consciousness itself. I suspect that one of the most important lines of research into consciousness will be in finding the pathways which control and disseminate input. By control, I mean arrest. So although consciousness is taking in vast amounts of data, we, as beings, can only deal with so much. So mechanisms exist to limit access and to actively forget certain inputs, and focus on what may be more important. This was important to survival and is central to so-called normal “sanity”. This again brings in the area of hallucinogenic drugs as a research tool. By delimiting the control mechanisms, or by use of meditation or hallucinogenic drugs, we are likely permitting a higher awareness. As mentioned previously, it is my opinion that “normal” sanity does depend on this limitation ability of the brain. At the same time we are then limiting the access to a vast number of neurons, which as far as we can tell, we are underutilizing. But I have to emphasize that my study, in this book, is about the basic mechanisms of consciousness and I cannot extend it, at this time, to any higher levels. As we have seen in the last paragraph, our consciousness is "capacity-limited". We have to learn more about those mechanisms involved. The control mechanisms in the limbic system and the frontal cortex will get far more attention than they currently receive, We will also pin down the neurophysiological analogues of many neurological deficits. This will not be confined to humans. To further enhance our ability to discover new and better behavioural adaptations to our environment, may mean, for the first time in our history, taking into account that the whole animal kingdom, excluding us, was not created for our benefit. There are many reasons that books on consciousness and mind will continue to be written. It is the last frontier in many ways. It is also close to the heart for so many of us, whether we are doctors, neuroscientists, philosophers, or simply curious human beings. The future developments in 124 neuropathology and neurophysiology are going to shed increasing light on what still appears to be such a mystery. I have tried to paint a picture of a physiological notion of consciousness which can provide paths for further research. It does imply that certain philosophical problems may be insoluble and best left to those willing to waste their days deciding if we have free will or if all is predetermined. So the "Hard problem" of consciousness may well remain an insoluble philosophical perplexity precisely because it need never have been invented. I have tried, also, to show that language in its evolution, symbolically, may go beyond what it can and should do, into realms of fantasy that no longer bear a relation to reality. Maybe it does need to extend into realms of fantasy but the problem has been the tendency to link the apparent structure of language to existential reality. We can borrow from anthropology here, because of the tremendously useful distinction between "emic" and etic" studies. "Emic" studies come from within a culture, more subjective, whereas "etic" would be the observed behaviour. This was first used by Kenneth Pike, a linguist, as an attempt to portray the difficulties of any truly objective "outside" account of behaviour. It becomes a methodological solution to an epistemological issue. We can never truly know what it feels like to be a bat, but, as stated before, I am not sure we can even truly know what it feels like to be another human being. Until we make "emic" attempts from the outside we will never penetrate that barrier. In other words we make the barrier disappear by methodology. I may never know what it is like to be a bat but I will never get close to finding out until I make maximum attempts to enter the bat world. I need to try and study the little devil from his own viewpoint as far as possible. In the latter stages of finishing up this theoretical investigation, I came across an interview between Susan Blackmore and Francisco Varela in "Conversations on Consciousness", Oxford University Press, 2005. In it was the concept of neurophenomenology, which was new to me. It struck a chord immediately as another way to eliminate this terrible forced dichotomy of 125 subject-object. I realize naturally, that Eastern mystics would think us funny for even considering that there is a problem. Varela, and indeed Blackmore herself, both have a decided interest in Eastern philosophy and Varela was a convert to Buddhism from an early age. He was not the first to make the attempt to link phenomenological thinking with neuroscience. "First-Person Science" has been seen as an oxymoron and remains highly controversial, but the idea is not new, and in medical research we are starting to accept the importance of Qualitative Medical Research, so it should not be such a paradigm shift to accept neurophenomenology. Varela himself, sadly, died of Hepatitis C in 2001, at a relatively young age and the world lost an innovative thinker and researcher. Qualitative Medical Research is in a sense a backlash to standard empirical science. Instead of coming up with theory first, it utilizes even subjective responses and then forms a so-called Ground-Based Theory which is then subject to more rigorous experimentation. Varela's critical concept was that of the Embodied Philosophy, i.e. that cognition and consciousness are only to be understood in terms of the body. The body needs to be seen as a total biological entity and phenomenologically experienced for this to be a productive line of enquiry. Varela stated, in a letter entitled "The Cosmos letter", sent to the Expo '90 Foundation, in Japan, that he believes we have evolved from our more primitive dualistic and representational/computational mode of thinking :"Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself". Personally I cannot over-emphasize enough the dangers of lingering dualism in our culture and especially in medicine and even more so in "mental health". Just as in Qualitative Medical Research, the whole point of 126 accepting subjective ideas is to amalgamate them into science and make predictions and perform the normal scientific operations on any hypotheses generated. I would like to quote from an abstract of an article published in the British Medical Journal BMJ 1998; 316 : 1230 (Published 18 April 1998) :"Qualitative research and evidence based medicine" authored by Judith Green and Nicky Britten. I will quote the abstract as a whole as it echoes, in a cogent manner, my own understanding of how to breach this epistemological gap-: "Qualitative research may seem unscientific and anecdotal to many medical scientists. However, as the critics of evidence based medicine are quick to point out, medicine itself is more than the application of scientific rules. Clinical experience, based on personal observation, reflection, and judgment, is also needed to translate scientific results into treatment of individual patients. Personal experience is often characterised as being anecdotal, ungeneralisable, and a poor basis for making scientific decisions. However, it is often a more powerful persuader than scientific publication in changing clinical practice, as illustrated by the occasional series “A patient who changed my practice” in the BMJ.” “In an attempt to widen the scope of evidence based medicine, recent workshops have included units on other subjects, including economic analysis and qualitative research. However, to do so is to move beyond the discipline of clinical epidemiology that underpins evidence based medicine. Qualitative research, in particular, addresses research questions that are different from those considered by clinical epidemiology. Qualitative research can investigate practitioners' and patients' attitudes, beliefs, and preferences, and the whole question of how evidence is turned into practice. The value of qualitative methods lies in their ability to pursue systematically the kinds of research questions that are not easily answered by experimental methods.” 127 “We use the example of asthma treatment to illustrate how qualitative methods can broaden the scope of evidence based medicine. Although there is consensus over evidence based practice in the treatment of asthma, questions remain about general practitioners' use of clinical guidelines and patients' use of prescribed medication.” So like a therapist I have to be empathic to my subject, so that I will start to see the world from his/her viewpoint. It is no different with, for example, a very primitive tribe of humans, or an infant. We are trying to decipher what they might be getting at. They are all communicating, just as most animals are. So we need the humility to breach the communication gap. Trying to understand what a lion might be saying is difficult because we are not lions, but that makes it a more interesting challenge. We cannot even make the assumption, as in the movie "Contact", that the language of mathematics, especially prime numbers would be intergalactic. A life form based on a different element may be feasible but would be very different from us in every way. Would it be looking at the same universe? Would science still work the same way? We have no way of knowing. If another form of creature is not DNA based, it would be very strange to us. However we ought to be able to figure out more easily what a lion is trying to say and at least let Wittgenstein know finally. As a philosopher, I want consciousness to be less of a mystery, and to feel confidence in its investigation. Neurophysiology must play a greater role. In terms of the pervasive paradigm, inherited from Descartes, we do not need further Mind/Body split theories in any form, holding back both philosophy and science. As a physician, I would like to see the whole concept of diseases of the humans to be seen strictly as that, i.e. diseases of human beings. That is to say of a complete human being, not one little dissected or created part. So diabetes and schizophrenia would both be diseases of the human being. Psychiatry would become far closer to mainstream medicine and neurophysiology would provide the link. A psychiatrist would simply be a specialist in disorders of behaviour, perception, emotion, ideation, but definitely not a specialist in "mental 128 disease". Logotherapy would still have a place but not be linked to mysterious entities such as minds. Cognitive behavioural modification is an advance in terminology. The process of eliminating "mind" is somewhat utilitarian. You gradually realize that you were operating with a concept that you quite simply do not require anymore. It will remain as a cultural item with non-specific ontology. I am certainly not saying that neuroscience completely "explains" consciousness but I am saying that we should not expect an explanation or definition of consciousness. If we can show more of the workings and move on with science assisted by some philosophical clarification, then we will approach a clearer comprehension of this concept of consciousness. I also wish to stress that I do not believe that the only role philosophy has is to clarify, or play the therapist. Philosophy has an important clarification role and also can lay claim to be theoretically constructivist when it needs to be. If it generates theories which are then shot down by either other philosophers or by scientists, that is how it should be. For the mystery of consciousness itself we will probably see a gradual erosion of philosophical perplexity, as neurophysiology, and more specifically neurophilosophy, answer more and more of the details of this mystery. 129 Index Abarognosis, 86 African Grey parrot, 29 Agnosia, 86, Alien hand syndrome, 93 amoebae, 2 amygdala, 62 Animal, 27 animal kingdom, 13, 70, 103, anthropocentric, 22, 31, 43 Aphasia, 94 Apraxia, 88 Aristotle, 4, 82 Arnold B. Scheibel,, 58 ATP, 2 Australopithecine, 117 bacteria, 65 Basal Ganglia, 61 Bat, 71 Bertrand Russell, IX Big Bang, 1 Biosemiotics, 34 bird, 22, 30 blind-sight, 41 brain, 10, 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 43, 46, 53, , 74, 83, Broca, 50 Burgess Shale, 5, 6 Cambrian, 5, cerebral cortex, 4, 47, 52, 57, 97, 111 Chalmers, 78, 115 chimpanzee, 26 Chimps, 21 Coacervates, 2 cognitive, 50, 86, 96, 99, 115 consciousness, 4,6,14,22,26,33,53,62,64 ,66,73,81,83,98,103,107,120,129 Cyanobacteria, 2 Darwin, 4, 39 Descartes, 128 deutocerebrum, 16 DNA, 3, 4, 118, 128 Dolphins, 31, 55, Donald Griffin, 27 Dr M O'C Drury, 103 Ectoderm, 49 emergent, 71, 113 emic, 22, 125 emotions, 4, 20, 26, 28,54 , 89, 104, 108, 118 empirical, 46,103 ethologists, 27 etic, 22, 125 Evolution, 4, 113 Fish, 15,44 130 G.E.Moore, 123 Galapagos Islands, 22 Gazzaniga, 27, 52 Gilbert Ryle, 108 Gorilla, 39 Hard problem, , 108, 125 Homo Sapiens, 108 human consciousness, 4, 27, 66, Jane Goodal, 46 Jeffrey Masson, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 104 Kenneth Pike, 125 Koko,32, 39 Locked-in Syndrome, 70, 86 Luria, 51, 68, 84 Marc Bekoff, 38 Margaret Klinowska, 55 mind, 8, 41,53,80, Monkeys,27 neurophilosophy, 129 pain, 15,32, 40, 53, 86, 90, 108, 112 Philosophical Investigations, 40, 109 prebionts, 2 Qualia, 108, 115 Qualitative Medical Research, 125 Russell, Bertrand 72, 112 Stephen Jay Gould, 4 Stephen Wiltshire, 109 Steven Roger Fischer, 29 Susan B.Eirich, 35 Susan Greenfield, 107 Susanne Langer, 106 Temple Grandin,16 Thomas Grandin, 13, 14, 80 Thomas Knierim, 53 Thomas Nagel, 71 Varela, Francisco115, 116 Wernicke, 67 Whitehead, 42 Windsor Chorlton, 22 Wittgenstein L,11, 39, 40, 89, 108, 112, 121, 131