50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 8 Levels of Automaticity (or Freedom)
It is time to further examine what is meant by that word I often use: automaton, or neuro-robot. Today, after a gentle afternoon rain, my eye spied a lichen on a rock. The rain had enhanced the contrast between the dark, inert rock and the living lichen, wet, puffy, and vivid green, geared up for a photosynthetic growth spurt.
Which would you rather be—a rock or a lichen? One reason to choose the rock is its truly lengthy, almost immortal existence. But I suspect most of us would go for the lichen. The lichen does not just exist, it lives. Sure, to us it is an alien life, a mixed-kingdom marriage of fungus and alga, stuck to a rock and without eyes or ears. Life, nevertheless, it is, with genetics, nutrient intake of gases and minerals, waste excretion, and even reproduction, creating elegant changing patterns in developmental time, all from complex internal dynamics that are specific to various lichen species. In all these ways, the lichen is rather close to us.
It is time to further examine what is meant by that word I often use: automaton, or neuro-robot. Today, after a gentle afternoon rain, my eye spied a lichen on a rock. The rain had enhanced the contrast between the dark, inert rock and the living lichen, wet, puffy, and vivid green, geared up for a photosynthetic growth spurt.
Which would you rather be—a rock or a lichen? One reason to choose the rock is its truly lengthy, almost immortal existence. But I suspect most of us would go for the lichen. The lichen does not just exist, it lives. Sure, to us it is an alien life, a mixed-kingdom marriage of fungus and alga, stuck to a rock and without eyes or ears. Life, nevertheless, it is, with genetics, nutrient intake of gases and minerals, waste excretion, and even reproduction, creating elegant changing patterns in developmental time, all from complex internal dynamics that are specific to various lichen species. In all these ways, the lichen is rather close to us.
Rock and lichen display what could be called levels of automaticity. The rock is hard and crystalline, with static, internal atomic bonds that are linked by tiny tinker-toy struts of vibrating electrons between the nodal atoms. The minerals within the rock have been studied successfully by physical chemists, and the crystals of those minerals can be modeled on computers. It is interesting to consider that the atoms in the minerals of the rock keep their same neighboring atoms for as long as the rock (as part of a larger bed) exists as a solid entity, typically for millions of years. That’s not a highly mobile society.
The lichen, in contrast, is a being that grows and dies through complex, shifting dynamics of organic chemical networks. Tens of thousands of different types of highly reactive molecules within each lichen cell are continuously transformed by breaking and re-forming atomic bonds. Many of the atoms, in fact, have new neighbors every few microseconds, as energy molecules build and dismantle others to form internal structures and regulatory chemical loops. These atoms, usually in the form of relatively simple molecules, even pass in and out of the lichen in endless processions of nutrients and wastes.
Yet as our understanding of the lichen grows, through the sciences of cell biology, molecular biology, and genomics, it becomes more and more likely that we could produce a computer model of the lichen. Already, computer models of certain molecular regulatory loops inside living cells simulate the rise and fall of concentrations of types of molecules that are key to the regulation of cellular metabolism. Advances are being made in modeling entire cells. In principle, the lichen is an automaton, a whole created from the interaction—albeit complex—of internal parts.
Scientists cannot build a computer model of human consciousness—yet. But neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are simulating components of the human mind, for example, in studying how decisions are made. Simple models are even being used to suggest how consciousness is a dynamical core of neurons that connect various, otherwise-disconnected, parts of the brain.
A rock is fairly well understood, a lichen less so, and the human mind even less so. But it is staggering how the understanding of all three has grown over the last hundred years. Unless we discover some limit to comprehending complex systems such as lichens and human minds, our knowledge seems to be assured of unimpeded growth. It means, to me, that as we become understood as a network of interacting parts (in which the interactions within the brain are correlated with the interactions of both conscious and unconscious human cognition), we will probably feel increasingly and unbearably like automatons. Because the automaticity I am referring to has to do not so much with our bodily functions of blood circulation and digestion but more with who we are mentally, we might want to coin a new term, for cognitive automaton. I have been using neuro-robot. But perhaps a word such as cognition, or cognitomaton, would serve well for the concept.
A big “but” is in order here: As the levels of automaticity here considered become more and more complex, from rock to lichen to human mind, they also become, in our colloquial language, more free. A rock sits in place until a flood or a volcano moves it, or someone kicks it. But the lichen, in contrast, grows from its own internal dynamics. And the human mind has will power (whatever that is), which can make decisions to move the entire body somewhere else on a moment’s whim.
If you preferred the lichen over the rock, that choice might indicate that you value processes that derive from the interior of the system. This increasing power of the interior, this heightening of self-shaping, comes about from the increased complexity of internal dynamics across the levels of being, from rock to lichen to human mind.
Consider the cognitive development of a child. In the early years, the child is a somewhat a stimulus-response machine, in which the stimulus comes from the outer world. Put your finger into a baby’s hand and it will close the fingers around yours. But as life proceeds, the child can make internal representation of objects in the outer world that are present in memory but no longer present to the senses. These internally imagined objects can become stimuli of behaviors on their own. I know I am simplifying here, but hopefully not dangerously so. The point is that we develop mental powers, like we develop physical powers.
As the mind develops, the child can begin to delay action and contemplate possibilities. Do I eat the cookie now, or do I save it for later? To save it, the future cookie and the pleasure it would give must be imagined as an internal representation. This capability can be seen as a growth in the power of the interior. The mind has become more complex.
I did not merely have an enhanced experience of gravity when I used imagination at the streamside. I also said to myself, I want to do more of that in the future. Furthermore, I told myself to remember what happened, so I can repeat, not the same experience, but the general type of experience and the process by which I got there. Somehow this ability to represent a type of experience seems in the direction of moving toward more personal freedom.
Yet—even a child’s judgment to save the cookie until later or my attempt to understand what brings about a certain kind of desirable experience with gravity could both be considered part of the human automaticity of being. The developmental trend toward the psychological interiorization could be part of the genetic-based, neuro-biological automatic pilot that we are endowed with and use as human beings, as we take cues from others with their own powerful interior dynamics as examples, to form our footwear and paths in becoming who we individually are as cultural, social beings.
I need to counter that line of reasoning. During most of my life, and especially when I was a young child, I did not think to myself that I’d like to design myself to be more interiorized. A person just develops that way, naturally, in proceeding from child to adult. But if one does say, “Oh, I’m setting a goal to become more interiorized,” then, whether as part of the “cognitomaton” or not, that inner statement puts in place a whole new level or scale of choice. One is thereby able to represent a process of interiorization as part of the interiorization.
The growth of new degrees or scales of complexity of the “interior” can be seen as growth in freedom. Are “growth” or “freedom” the best words? Choose your preference in terminology here. Growth in freedom can be seen in a big picture, as evolutionary changes in styles of being, from rock to lichen to human mind. At the very least, in this growth, is a kind progress that we, as humans, obviously value. And I discussed a development of the “interior” during the course of a human life, as well. There are no easy answers to questions about free will or automaticity. And one can easily fall into loops of easy answers: “Hey, whatever you say is more freedom I say is a new type of automaticity.” But if I sometimes call myself an automaton, then let me be a complex one, a freer one, with many levels of interiorization. I can begin to automatically remind myself, consciously, to continue growing such new levels.
References and Notes
About our overall themes here, I wholeheartedly suggest several books that thoughtfully explore the issues: Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett (2004), The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human (2023) by Joseph LeDoux, and Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (2023) by Kevin J. Mitchell.
The English neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey has often written about the brain’s ability to make internally perceived images (broadly construed) that become stimuli to behaviors. Books of his I have read with interest include Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (2006) and Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (2023).
A ground-breaking big-picture work that emphasized a big-picture evolution of freedom was Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1959). I recently (early 2020s) re-read large parts of it, and though flawed scientifically in many places, the overall themes held up well and were prescient about what is now being called cosmic evolution or “big history.”
About advances in modeling an entire cell, see for example: "Molecular dynamics simulation of an entire cell," by Jan Adriaan Stevens and 8 coauthors, Frontiers in Chemistry, 11, 2023. They do say, “Our whole-cell simulation is only a first step,” acknowledging the reality that a real cell is a complex hierarchy of scales in space and time not yet modeled.
In the final paragraph, I know you know I’m not suggesting we came from lichens. After my initial experience of the lichen, I’m continue using the lichen and living cells as a stand-in for a general level of living being in the meditation, and because it was my seeing the lichen that prompted this meditation, I’m leaving it as an object in my imagination as a prompt for pondering.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
Fellow traveler... delighted to discover your Mind Watching series. Our paths criss-crossed for over a decade, stating in Milwaukee of…