It was an amazing moment in the history of science. Jane Goodall, a 26-year-old who had already spent more than five months, beginning in July 1960, trying to get close to wild chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), succeeded in gaining the confidence of a band of chimps.
Up to this point, very little had been discovered about Chimpanzee behavior in the wild. Notoriously shy animals, no one had ever had the patience to try and get close to them.
On Nov. 14, 1960, Goodall was observing the old male chimp she named "Greybeard" sitting by a stream. Greybeard would later become a media superstar when National Geographic began a series of documentaries chronicling Goodall's work. Goodall watched in astonishment as she saw him strip leaves off a stick to "fish" for termites inside a mound. This landmark observation fundamentally challenged the prevailing scientific belief that humans were the only species capable of creating and using tools.
The mainstream position in neuroscience is that cognition is a necessary ingredient of consciousness — that somehow, the capacity for complex thought goes hand in hand with this mysterious phenomenon of subjective experience. Yet now we have computers that can achieve such cognitive feats, and still, we seem no closer to understanding how the brain produces our conscious awareness.
Most discussions of AI and consciousness ask whether machines can experience anything. But maybe the real mystery is: If consciousness is not fundamentally related to higher cognition, then what kind of phenomenon is it?
"For decades, cognitive neuroscience was organized around a grand challenge: explaining how electrical activity flowing through networks of brain cells could produce the remarkable behaviors associated with our intelligence," writes Daniel Freeman, a scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory developing transcranial ultrasound and AI methods to identify the neural basis of conscious experience. "Planning, reasoning, problem-solving, creativity: These were treated as the crown jewels of the mind."
Except a machine, thinking thousands of times faster than the human mind, "exhibited many of those same abilities using nothing more than electrons bouncing around in a little block of silicon," writes Freeman.
Yes, but it's not "real" thinking, is it?
A strange possibility has emerged. Maybe we have already solved a large part of what once seemed mysterious about cognition. Perhaps the ability to generate intelligent behavior never required anything beyond this clever trick of signal processing that we call “neural networks.” If so, intelligence may be more portable than we once imagined. The same computational architecture that operates in biological neurons can be implemented in silicon microprocessors, or even in hypothetical mechanical systems built from springs, gears and levers. The physical substrate may vary, but the computations, which produce human-like behavior, do not.
Freeman writes, "The mainstream position in neuroscience is that cognition is a necessary ingredient of consciousness — that somehow, the capacity for complex thought goes hand in hand with this mysterious phenomenon of subjective experience." He adds, "Yet now we have computers that can achieve such cognitive feats, and still, we seem no closer to understanding how the brain produces our conscious awareness."
It sounds a little like Fermi's Paradox, where a universe being 15 billion years old, housing an uncounted number of intelligent species, but even our sophisticated searches have failed to uncover a hint of intelligence elsewhere in the universe.
Even with AI powering our machines, we are no closer to understanding the phenomenon of consciousness than we were at the beginning of the 21st century.
Neurologist Antonio Damasio worked with patients whose brain injuries had left their intellect largely untouched, but had disrupted their ability to navigate the world. They could reason and hold conversations, but their decision-making had been radically impaired.
One of Damasio’s most cited patients had damage to a region of the prefrontal cortex known to be critical for emotional valuation. When presented with two possible appointment times, the patient was paralyzed with indecision, spending hours considering the question. The problem was not a lack of intelligence. Rather, the emotional signals that normally assign value to different options had been disrupted. The patient lost the gut feeling that normally guides decision-making.
This observation became the foundation of Damasio’s influential 1994 book, “Descartes’ Error.” The central idea was simple but provocative: Feelings aren’t peripheral to rational thought. They are part of the machinery that makes rational thought possible.
Could it really be that simple? "Inspired by Damasio’s insights, more and more researchers have been exploring the possibility that human thought may not constitute a separate category of experience from feeling," writes Freeman. "Instead, our stream of thought may emerge from combinations of a finite number of primitive feeling states."
If that's the case, perhaps the neural pathways that define our emotional lives might reveal an astonishing fact: "It may be that the computations occurring throughout the brain remain largely hidden from awareness, and what we actually experience consists of a highly processed, felt summary of their results."
Rather than being a "whole brain" phenomenon, consciousness might actually reside in the deeper, more primitive sections of the brain. "This possibility is consistent with the finding that deep-brain stimulation in humans can evoke intense subjective experiences, whereas stimulation of large regions of the prefrontal cortex often produces little or no conscious effect," Freeman writes.
If this were the case (and I'm not claiming that it's the answer or the only answer), the deepest part of our brain is also the oldest. It may be that our human ancestors from whom we are descended may have also possessed a rudimentary consciousness similar to our own.
Why is the execution of these biological functions accompanied by a felt, objective experience? The "hard" problem of understanding subjective experience may eventually disappear once we better understand complex neural architectures, brain chemistry, or deep-brain emotional signaling. So perhaps simply understanding the mechanics of consciousness won't be enough.
Here's where the physical meets the metaphysical. It's not at all clear we'll ever have a definitive answer to the question of where consciousness comes from and where it resides.
