Consciousness

[Michael Lissack]

In an effort to return to a discussion worthy of intellectual pursuit, I would like to suggest my working definition of consciousness and invite others to disagree, tear apart, expand upon etc.

To me consciousness is having access to a prior state (of self) such that awareness of the prior state can inform current or prospective actions.  Most animals thus have consciousness.

A human with alzheimers whose current memory processes have severely deteriorated might have consciousness with regard to some of the more distant past and little of the immediately current past.

Michael Lissack 

14 Stratford Rd Marblehead MA 01945 phone 617-710-9565

http://lissack.com

Michael is the immediate past President of the American Society for Cybernetics (2014-2020), Executive Director Emeritus of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence and Professor of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, Shanghai.  Opinions expressed are my own and do not reflect the views of any of the institutions with which I have an affiliation.

[Jaimi Hendrix]

Dear Michael et al,

On the assumption that the earlier flurry of emails was nothing more than a storm in an Alice-in-Wonderland tea-cup, I still prefer the following definition of consciousness best: the ability to think "this is me." Lacan's experiment with the mirror in which a baby is delighted to see an image of herself.

Of course, that baby was in her mother's womb for nine months. She heard her mother's voice and those around her mother as soon as she came into existence.  Furthermore, she was not isolated and deprived from human contact (like Harry Harlow's monkeys at Goon Park) once she left the womb.  She was touched, stroked and talked to; a non-abused, well-cared-for baby.  Thus,.this definition includes the social dimension, but not necessarily the linguistic order.

So, I believe, for the sake of saving humanity (Shann's words, not mine), I propose that, at a minimum, we stop using the word consciousness when talking about robots or animals that fail the mirror test.  There is nothing gained from trivializing the important distinction between human consciousness and whatever all those other terms are supposed to capture.

Of course, if there is a more appropriate word to denote human consciousness, let us use that word by all means.

My very best, Jaimi H.

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[Randall Whitaker]

Michael Wrote:

To me consciousness is having access to a prior state (of self) such that awareness of the prior state can inform current or prospective actions.

----------------

Jaimi Wrote:

I still prefer the following definition of consciousness best: the ability to think "this is me." 

----------------

These two statements illustrate the most fundamental problem in addressing consciousness - the definition / delineation of the concept "consciousness" itself.  This concept is every bit as slippery and vague in academic discussions as it is in everyday parlance, even though scholars of various stripes have been wrestling with the concept for centuries.

For the sake of illustration, it's worthwhile to refer back to Anil Seth's essay, which set off the flurry of recent discussion.  Seth writes:

"A good starting point is to distinguish between conscious level, conscious content, and conscious self. Conscious level has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware. Conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe. And among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious self, and is probably the aspect of consciousness that we cling to most tightly."

Seth's three subsidiary distinctions drawn within "consciousness" illustrate how there are multiple approaches to, or perspectives upon, the concept.  This multiplicity of vantage points results in differential foci on what's being addressed and / or what's been defined or explained.  This in turn almost invariably leads to confusion, conflation, and talking past each other.

Michael's stated orientation would seem to be framed with respect to what Seth calls "conscious content", whereas Jaimi's orientation is focused on what Seth calls "conscious self."

Regardless of how accurate or complete one considers Seth's trichotomy to be, it's sufficient to illustrate the unfortunate fact that one cannot address "consciousness" without specifying or clarifying which aspect(s) insinuated by the overall label may be the one(s) in play for the sake of discussion.

If we are to obtain any traction on the subject it would behoove each of us to circumscribe which aspect of the grab-bag construct called "consciousness" is being addressed, so that (metaphorically) each of us can make clear to our fellow blind folks which part of the elephant we are individually touching.

- Randy (Whitaker)

[Jason the Goodman]

Hi Randy, hi Jaimi,

My suggestion is that we simply always use an adjective to mean what we mean when mentioning the term:

- biological consciousness; (in the medical sense, like someone just wakes from a coma but not knowing who am I yet）;

- psychological consciousness; (i.e. self-identity, waking up in the morning and getting ready to work - not talking to anybody yet);

- social consciousness; (within the context of social interactions, awareness of one's situation in a meeting, etc.)

- political consciousness; (awareness of one's own value system and therefore standing point and who to vote);

Communist Parties have been talking about "communist consciousness" for many years, they meant a totally perfectly brainwashed fighter of theirs, close to the status of a suicide bomber getting ready to take other people's lives in order to go heaven to meet their 72 virgins. Also a type of consciousness, right?

My guess is that the very exact boundary between the whole natural science and the whole social science can be drawn between different types of consciousness, would you agree?

Thoughts?

Best - Jason

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[Randall Whitaker]

Jason:

I have no problem with the listing you offered, to the extent it's a sampler illustrating the variety of contexts or domains within which a given subject (person; observer) may exhibit some flavor of "consciousness."  However, I don't believe partitioning the space of possibilities by context / domain is sufficient to either clearly specify these diverse possibilities or serve as a sole map or index for parsing or categorizing particular cases.

It strikes me that some schema accommodating the intersections among operational contexts / domains (per se) and operational capacities (e.g., basic capability / referentiality / reflexivity as one might claim are suggested by Seth's trichotomy) is necessary to have any hope of mapping causal, functional, etc., aspects of the phenomenon (process; whatever ... ) to the various contexts or domains within which it manifest or evident.  Moreover, I'm not certain interconnecting or integrating these two orthogonal schemata would prove sufficient in the long run.

I would also claim that partitioning by venue or context does nothing to illuminate underlying mechanisms, causation, constraints, etc.  Neither, for that matter, does Seth's trichotomy.  Phrased another way, I'd say both schemata suggest bases for sorting the diverse things to which the label "consciousness" is applied, but neither offers much in the way of explaining what "consciousness" means or how it is manifested.

- Randy

[Lucas Pawlik]

Dear Jason,
Dear Bernard,  
                         the different forms of consciousness you mention reflect the ability to make models of relations. As humans, we enjoy a tremendous advantage because we can plan a little better than the other animals, and therefore like to foreground the ego consciousness that can better manipulate the other relations. This manipulation ability is biologically reflected in our movement diversity. Everything we do, another animal can do better, but no animal masters as many movement variations as we humans do.  Therefore, we can claim most of the planet. Now the faster our civilization advances, however, the more we prioritize the internalized movement of "thinking." Roughly speaking I understand consciousness in such a way that we must perceive our thinking as a form of movement,  and thus we must assume a form of space, which permits us this internalized movement.  

If we want to discuss consciousness without being entirely caught up in allegorical causalities, it is necessary, I think, both to get as much clarity as possible that consciousness is not a thing, and that things are not things, but tangible results of our specific behavior.  If we want to understand consciousness,  we need to understand the paradox and self-reference of language as well as possible, and we need, a high investment in the exploration of our biological perceptual capacity.

Otherwise, we just talk about our language habits without realizing it. Watzlawick brings this to the point when he says: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you encounter will be a nail."

Best regards

Lucas 

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[Bernard C E Scott]

Dear Lucas,

I will not be taking part in this discussion. All I wish to say can be found Chapter 8 of my recent book.

Best wishes,

Bernard

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[Bernard C E Scott]

PS Dear Lucas, 

In the round, I largely agree with what you say. I just do not feel like repeating what I've said elsewhere. My own interests go back to the empirical studies (briefly described in Part 8 of my book) that  I carried out on skill acquisition, for my PhD, some 50 years ago.

Bernard

[Jason the Goodman]

Randy,

Perhaps it is high time that we gave this topic a thorough treatment through a classroom-type discussion? Not sure how many people would be interested in it though. 

I'm not trying to use a "partition by context" methodology, although that is reasonable too. My perspective is from what I presented as "Multiple-Layer Self-Organization" view, i.e. an ontogenetic approach following Marslaw and Kohlberg. That is to say, this thing we call consciousness is hypothesized to have multiple layers which emerge one after another.  In my previous message, the different layers are (emergencies at) biological level, psychological level, social level (passive interactive), and political level (active interactive). The key is the higher(or later) level won't emerge before the previous level is ready. By "ready" I mean approaching the classic self-organization stabilization of one SO process, or one eigenstate is achieved.

Thus, we could have the following types (levels) of consciousness:

"I am a cat therefore I chase mice."

"I am a dog, not a human. I love to play ball. I wish my human can always play with me."

"What are this terrible squeezing on me and this coldness? I'd better cry (first time coming outside my womb.)" 

"where am I? looks like I'm in a hospital bed? what happened to me? is she a nurse? she is good-looking." (I admit that "hospital/nurse" are social constructions already.)

"This meeting is boring. I'd better to check my emails" (Switching from one social interaction to another, per a previously established code of conduct."

Consciousness levels involve not only the self-identity (like Jaime mentioned mirror test) but also the cognitive judgment of the context - or "the identity of the object." E.g., "Cybcom is a forum" can be further distinguished into two levels - "A forum is a place that I say things to expose myself" versus "A forum is a place that people come to think together, i.e. discussion."  What happened recently on Cybcom was a showcase of this distinction. 

Thoughts?

Best regards - Jason

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[Jaimi Hendrix]

Dear Joshua,

I am a little puzzled. In your email below, were you talking about my request asking that one stops taking one specific word and then give it 4-plus meanings that have nothing to do with one another?  Or, was it a pure accident that you used this particular thread to share your message of general concern about the dynamics in this group?  

If it was the latter case, then ignore my email.

If yes, what is wrong with requesting that cyberneticians take a close look at how the tendency to stretch and mold concepts to mean everything under the sun hurts and holds back their field?  Could the tendency to work with different sets of distinctions without explaining that one is actually working with a subtly different set of distinctions be not the reason that the conversation between Michael and Bernard blew up?

My very best, Jaimi H.

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 8:43 PM Joshua Madara <jama...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, all,

I tend to take a light-handed approach to forum moderation, allowing folks to sort things out among themselves. But I was getting very close to intervening here. It seems perhaps the situation has been resolved, at least for now.

I have great admiration for many of you who participate in CybCom; that is why I made the effort to transport CybCom when GWU announced they were retiring it. I mean, c'mon, folks; many of you are just one or two degrees removed from the very first cyberneticians, and I think that is worth something, something worth preserving (speaking of, I would be delighted to help with a cybernetics museum, been have been too busy at work to participate in those conversations just now). I want to believe that the legacy of cybernetics, and the realization that CybCom is part of that legacy, is enough to lift us all out of petty squabbles and personal attacks, and even the desire to prove ourselves right so darned much. *Especially* us; we who talk so much about things such as 'control' and 'communication' and 'variety'.

I mean it very sincerely when I say I love this group of people, and it always hurts when people you love hurt each other, and, well, just knock it off, OK? We have too much cybernetics to do to allow all that nonsense. :)

Sincerely,

Joshua

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[Bernard C E Scott]

Dear Jaimi,

The difference between ML and me was not about a different set of distinctions. It was about my having to deal with an amoral troll, a most unpleasant experience.

Best wishes,

Bernard

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

It seems to me that the list-owner has temporarily to step in and moderate the list. Emails such as the one here below are offensive. 

We know this as 'flaming". It occurs more often on email lists. Usually, it dies out after a month or so. The moderator / list-owner can speed this up by censoring personal insults. 

The difference between ML and me was not about a different set of distinctions. It was about my having to deal with an amoral troll, a most unpleasant experience.

This is offensive because the colleague  in question is not a troll.

Perhaps, the only possibility is to leave this list behind. 

Best, 

Loet

Loet Leydesdorff

________________________________

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge" at

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-59951-5 (Open Access)

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030599508 (Hardcopy)

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

[Jason the Goodman]

Hi Loet, perhaps there are different definitions of the word "troll", the folklore usage and the internet slang usage are different. Perhaps Bernard was using the latter and you are using the former.  According to Wiki, "In internet slang, a troll is a person who posts inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception."  Consider the fact that this is not accidental between ML and Bernard, but is repeated several times, I think Bernard's usage of the word is reasonable or close enough.  Just two cents of food for thought. Best - Jason 

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[Bernard C E Scott]

Dear Loet and Jason,

I appropriated the word 'troll' from a recent email from someone else on our list, regarding ML's behaviour. It seemed to be a useful shorthand.

BTW, I received an email from ML after he left CybCom. It was quite insulting. I replied lightheartedly. My 'door' is still open to the right overture.  As I recall from my schooldays, enemies can become good friends.

I repeat, I have compassion for him. I wish him well.

Bernard

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[Salvo Grixti]

Dear Michael,

 

Yes, I would agree that is definitely a part of consciousness. There does seem to be a historical element of consciousness such that we can view consciousness as a historical entity

 

My definition of consciousness is a mixture of Hegel and Pask. First, the Hegel: consciousness requires a apprehender and a apprehended. I as an apprehender, apprehend my world which exists as something apprehended to me. So, for me consciousness involves a first-person subjective perspective as a minimal unit. The second involves Pask's idea of perspectives which engage in conversations with one another. I can have a perspective and you can have a perspective and we can talk about our individual perspectives to each other, yet we also have different perspectives within ourselves as human beings which are also conversing with each other. The dynamic "voices" you hear in your head making you doubt yourself, telling you to do something, etc., are also in some sense conversing with each other.

 

So, for me, Consciousness is a bit like an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where you have people talking over bad corny movies. You have the apprehender-apprehended relation, by virtue of watching the movie but you also have the conversational element where you have the different characters (perspectives) in the theater talking and conversing among themselves about how bad the movie is.

 

That's my two cents,

 Salvo Rumata Grixti

[Randall Whitaker]

Jason Wrote:

Perhaps it is high time that we gave this topic a thorough treatment through a classroom-type discussion? Not sure how many people would be interested in it though. 

I'm not trying to use a "partition by context" methodology, although that is reasonable too. My perspective is ...  

-------------------------

I agree there's probably a progressive or telescoping schema by which one might categorize "consciousness" in various situations or contexts - e.g., one ranging from simply "being conscious" (mind up and running; not comatose) all the way up / out to more complex situations such as social scenarios requiring inference about one's own and others' reflexive states and orientations.

However, I'm not willing to evaluate, much less accept or choose, any such schema until and unless it's grounded in a specification of what is entailed in the "consciousness" being described or categorized.  This is the essential problem, and IMHO it cannot be brushed aside by waving one's hands and invoking "awareness" as a proper foundation for explanation.  Above and beyond the fact it's essentially a synonym for "consciousness" in some sense(s), "awareness" is every bit as vague and elusive a construct.

As Salvo touches upon above, the notion of "awareness" invariably insinuates some measure of allusion to a dyadic relationship between a beholder and what's beheld.  I don't think any substantial traction can be obtained on the notion of "consciousness" without clarifying where and how these two aspects arise and interact.

In any event, it remains the case that whatever we might mean by "consciousness" could be no more than an illusion - e.g., an explanatory fiction useful for limiting complexity in abstract thought processes or a metaphor absorbed / adopted from our inescapable immersion in language / languaging once past a certain point in development / experience.

- Randy

[Louis Kauffman]

Dear Folks,

This is just a comment on the matter of having or not having definitions.

We should, at least be aware (sic) that we have not fully agreed upon definitions, in the mathematical or scientific sense, for many terms in cybernetics.

This makes the domains for these terms open to creative investigation.

And when we write, using such terms, we need to discuss their use since most generally “the meaning of a word is its use”.

Some undefined terms of cybernetics:

cybernetics

distinction

observer

system

closed system

open system

observing system

language

cognition

information

consciousness

awareness

variety

requisite variety

order

disorder

random

control

feedback

signal

process

I am sure you can add to the list.

By the way, there is nothing bad about undefined terms. In mathematics it is common practice to have a set of basic terms that are undefined and to postulate usage and relationships among these terms

to create a given theory. Thus in graph theory we have “nodes” and “edges” that are undefined, but it is given that an edge is associated with two nodes ( for simple graph ) or one node ( for an edge that is a loop).

A graph is completely specified by its nodes and edges, and by the way the edges are associated with the nodes. Any structure that has such a pattern can be interpreted as a graph. Thus nodes and edges are not only undefined, they can be anything at all. (I imagine the graph of my cognition where the nodes are my thoughts, and the edges are my thoughts that connect thoughts to themselves and to other thoughts. I image the graph of the universe where the stars are the nodes and the edges are the routes of the starship enterprise between them. And so on.)

Of course it is given that the nodes and edges are somehow distinguishable entities, and it is not talked about  just how these distinctions are to be made. It would 

depend upon an unknown context to tell those distinctions. 

The main point is that having undefined terms is a first step. The next step is to possibly agree upon the relationships of these terms. 

When you state a relationship such as

“Second order cybernetics is the study of observing systems.” 

do you understand what you are talking about? 

Does the person to whom you speak this sentence understand what you are talking about? 

In the absence of definitions, are you prepared to discuss the meaning of such statements?

I say that you should be so prepared. 

There is much to say and some of it could converge to the creation of new cybernetics 

and new relationships to the thoughts of others.

All of this requires the willingness to

create new language,

interact with your own given language,

interact and understand the language of others,

convince others to try speaking your language,

convince yourself to try speaking the language of others.

We learn to speak by speaking, to think by thinking and to define by defining.

Speaking, thinking and defining are always incomplete.

They  always continue into further creation.

Best,

Lou

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[Roger Harnden]

Nice one, Lou.

Only trouble is that as plentifully witnessed in this thread and other places in this forum over the years, most of us (ie people) most of the time are unwilling or unable to live and cognise in uncertainty.

And I really am not sure how much this anciently stated state of affairs (surely Tao) is in any way addressable.

I used to simply put it down to ‘western’ cultures and linguistic practices but am not at all sure that I was right in this…….else it would not have lurked in lterary and spiritual consciousness all these centuries.

But however much you sometimes irritate (not a grating sort of irritation, but milder ☺️), you do have a delightful and uncannily clear way of laying down or even describing (though that is the wrong word in this context)  the issue……….

Thanks.

Roger ☺️

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Randall and colleagues:

It seems to me that different from a biologistic percpective, consciousness emerges in interhuman communications and can be further developed and analyzed at that level. Freud (1926) noted that "thrift" has a similar status. It is always psychological. The psyche has no internal access to the body. Consciousness is specific as a medium needed for interhuman communication.  The complexity is retained at the individual level as consciousness.

As another golden rule: the construction is bottom-up, but after a bifurcation another dimension can take over control. The reorganization of this newly emreging eigenvector (in a reaction-diffusion dynamic) drives the transitions and can overwrite them. 

Best, Loet 

Loet Leydesdorff

________________________________

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam 
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

lo...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

"The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge" at

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-59951-5 (Open Access)

https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030599508 (Hardcopy)

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7835-3098;    

[Jason the Goodman]

Dear Loet, could you offer a few examples about "after a bifurcation another dimension can take over control"?  Highly interested. Sounds compatible with my little theory of multiple-layer self-organization and concepts of "feed-down vs feed-up"?  Best regards - Jason

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[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Jason,

There are others on this list (from the natural sciences and math) much more competent in explaining this than a social scientist. The central references are:

Rashevsky, N. (1940). An approach to the mathematical biophysics of biological self-regulation and of cell polarity. Bull. Math. Biophys., 1 , 15-25.

Turing, A. M. (1952). The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 237 , 37-72.

I gave a summary on pp. 170 ff. of my 2006 book:

Leydesdorff, L. (2006). The Knowledge-Based Economy: Modeled, Measured, Simulated . Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers. 

 (There are probably illegal copies on the internet).

Best, Loet (I can make a copy tomorrow. )

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[Louis Kauffman]

Dear Roger,

I agree that we should attain clarity in our basic concepts.

Best,

Lou

P.S. The enclosed document is not stolen and is dstributed here with the permission of the author.

[Lorenzo Moriondo]

Hi,

TLDR; I try here to give an interpretation of consciousness using the tools of cognition, basing the reasoning on the concepts of membrane/interface as researched in biology and computational sciences; inspired by a discussion I have read some time ago in this list by Goodman and Kauffman about truth and eigenforms. This is part of my effort to give myself a proper vocabulary for the description. Jump to the final paragraphs for a one-off summary -> ###

Introducing myself:

I am a practicing software engineer that tries to apply innovative concepts to development of effective processes in small dynamical businesses and communities, everything written here comes from the reading and private research done to build this background and so has to be intended (I hope this level of pragmatism won't affect anybody's sensibility or sound pretentiously explanatory). Sorry if these may sound naive but they come from an elaboration that weights less on historical evolution of concepts and a little more on up-to-date experimental evidences; this is because in my opinion science in the last 25 years has been so much transformative in particular now that some years have passed since the inception of large scale computation applied to genome discovery and astrophysics, and now that these technology are being applied to neurosciences.

Some basic intuitions:

These are some basics intuitions I have built build for the sake of the discussion:

* planetary scope: anything that could be said about phenomena related to life is worked out in the scope of life-as-we-know-it at the current time, e.g. excluding alternative lifeforms in the universe or entities that are below above or beyond our current threshold definition for life; or belonging to segregated evolutionary pathways to the one on this planet. If we want to discuss consciousness, we should always keep in mind that it is earthly consciousness in the boundaries of current biological thought (I know this can be evident but it is not always evident to any peer I discussed with).

* "fractality" is here always: I see a necessity for tentative assertions about consciousness to be fit to be applied to multiple scales so to have a good mechanism to search for optimal areas of research (e.g. the representations that allow the presence of invariants or other relevant network of  properties); in this case I assume, for the sake of trying to give an interpretation of the phenomenon as it is intended, the two relevant "scaling thresholds" (scoped system for the sake of providing an optimal research area) to be:
    ** the one analytical ground that is the simplifying duality between a "neural" structure (the neural network or other computational/conductive systems that allows transmission of information/signal for the sake of coordination/synchronisation) and the biological infrastructure that this network serves and leverages;
    ** the one analytical ground that is the simplifying duality between the "individual being" that the above systems together define and the external world with which this "being" is involved with in feedback mechanisms.
As far as I understood, those are both interests or experimental grounds for cybernetic thinking since Wiener and Ashby. Studying these "scaled grounds" looking for invariants gives a lot of room to apply the tools of cybernetics; I think cybernetics naturally gives the tools to find invariant properties or relations between the different scales of this fractal shape that are phenomena (the two above are just rough macro-scales for the sake of the argument and to build an intuition about how the basics of cybernetics provide some of the starting invariant properties). This brings to the next question: how we define boundaries (membranes, interfaces, see below), biology contributed in the right direction by providing well-understandable (even if still debatable on some terms) definitions for species and population, I am sure neurosciences will contribute the same given enough time to provide the right framework to detail further into the "fractality" of the functioning of the neural structure and its relations to the rest of the body and the world around. This is an extrapolation from the definition of algorithm (in this interpretation circuits are algorithms) and the interpretation that hardware-software is a geometry of algorithms.

* boundaries, an extended indetermination: for a system having defined boundaries is surely the principal (or among the few principal) property (this is a constant invariant of life-as-we-know-it since unicellular organisms and probably before); whatever metrics are applied to assign boundaries to a network graph representation of a system they may probably be quite arbitrary. Can we say that two systems are segregated systems even if highly interconnected compared to the close or far neighbours? Can we establish properties of the two systems that imply the two to be objectively distinct?

For example, a chemical compound bound on the trajectory to a cell membrane to be absorbed or a meteorite bound to a planet's gravitational field are, and "how much", part of the cell's or planet's system, is it possible to have an objective definition on this? In my opinion the answers to these questions are NOs, but the initial invariant (necessity of membranes for life to specialise) remains well grounded in current evolutionary theories; so we have an intuition of the lot of noise to clear before analytically reaching the identification of an invariant. In the case of studying consciousness this noise is overwhelming because of the even heavier confusion between observer and observables and how impossible it is to establish analytical boundaries compared to other phenomena.

I would be glad to collect contributions in these areas from established cybernetics thinking.

### Summary

Starting from the intuitions built above, my interpretation for some basics that allow further expansion:

A. consciousness can be observed as a programmable interface between a spatial-computational system and a surrounding (at current knowledge, biological) infrastructure;

B. these two systems, if observed as non-distinct, are themselves a programmable interface between a feedback-adjusted (reinforced) ordering function and the set of phenomena and operations it exchanges information with.

C. The ability of the human (as an example of "intelligent" being) is to evolutionary acknowledge, then reason about and, in more recent times, to program these two interfaces.

D. There are  an arbitrary number of other interfaces that can be described, their behaviours and characteristics are established by disciplines for the sake of scientific enquiries.

Just a final note: with "feedback-adjusted ordering function" I intend a function that constantly improves its computational efficiency with the objective to counterbalance (try to minimise the surge of) entropy (disorder).

Hope this may be of some interest to somebody and help to provide new intuitions. As I am not a social scientist I don't know how much these intuitions can be extended to networks of individuals but I can imagine that are highly influential to the single nodes as new technologies increasingly affect the way the human is allowed to program interfaces as a single and leveraging much more effective collaborative capabilities. 

Lorenzo,

https://pramantha.net

https://economyoftime.net/