© 1975-1979, 2008 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., Xenology: An Introduction to the Scientific Study of Extraterrestrial Life, Intelligence, and Civilization, First Edition, Xenology Research Institute, Sacramento, CA, 1979; http://www.xenology.info/Xeno.htm

14.3  Alien Consciousness and the Sentience Quotient

At last we arrive at the fascinating question of alien consciousness -- whether it exists, what form it may take, and how advanced it may be. From our awareness of our own consciousness, we suspect it may be the most significant and unique aspect of the human thinking apparatus. Will ETs be conscious too?

Despite several millennia of avid theorizing, philosophers, theologians and psychologists still cannot agree exactly what consciousness is. The standard dictionary definition is fairly popular: "Consciousness is the awareness of one’s self as a thinking being." (Indeed it has been argued by some that the emergence of self-awareness represented the true dawn of human ity.²⁵⁶⁴) Other definitions abound, ranging from "awareness of awareness" to mere "wakefulness" or alertness. According to Dr. Julian Jaynes, a Princeton University psychologist, most people feel that consciousness is the most self-evident thing imaginable about the human psyche:

We feel it is the defining attribute of all our waking states, our moods and affections, our memories, our thoughts, attentions, and volitions. We feel comfortably certain that consciousness is the basis of concepts, of learning and reasoning, of thought and judgment, and that it is so because it records and stores our experiences as they happen, allowing us to retrospect on them and learn from them at will.²⁵⁹⁹

Unfortunately, most if not all of these statements may be false. Consciousness does not appear to be a copy of experience, storing up experience, copying it like a camera to be reflected upon at some future time. Rather, suggests Jaynes, "conscious retrospection is the retrieval of what you have been conscious of before, and the reworking of these elements into rational or plausible patterns." Consciousness is not necessary for conceptualization either. One of the great functions of language, Jaynes says, is "to let the word stand for a concept, which is exactly what we do in writing or speaking about conceptual material, {which} we must do because concepts are usually not in consciousness at all." Similarly consciousness seems unnecessary for learning, which snails and flatworms can do. In fact thinking, judgment, verbal association, deductive and inductive reasoning, intuition, creativity and abstraction all do not require consciousness in order to be displayed by an intelligent lifeform. Concludes Jaynes:

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flash light, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.... Consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities. If our reasonings have been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of men who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all.²⁵⁹⁹

Consciousness, much like intelligence itself, appears to be an example of what is called an "emergent" by evolutionary theorists. According to Dr. James Grier Miller, President of the University of Louisville and a pioneer in systems science, more complex living systems at higher levels of organization manifest characteristics, more than the sum of the characteristics of the units which comprise them, not observed at lower levels.³⁰⁷¹ These new characteristics are emergents, made possible by the increased complexity present in higher-level systems. Dr. A.G. Cairns-Smith, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, describes emergents from the standpoint of biological evolution:

One can see natural selection as conserving and improving biological machinery. But this is far from the whole story: sometimes a quite new function is discovered, or some new way of performing an old one. Maynard Smith³³⁰³ has discussed how this can happen. He says: "This is a very common feature of evolution: a new structure evolves first because it confers advantage by performing one function, but in time it reaches a threshold beyond which it can effectively perform a different function." Lungs seem to have arisen through such a threshold, through fish finding another use for the esophagus -- as an auxiliary respiratory organ. This set in train a series of modifications that was to lead, eventually, to the exclusive respiratory organs of animals. The "improving" aspect of selection was an essential part of the story, but lungs are not improved gills, they did not evolve through a succession of design modifications from gills. Lungs took over.

Objects often turn out to have uses other than that for which they were originally designed: headlamps are signals, books are flower presses, and so on. Indeed often a machine may be curiously well adapted to an inadvertent function, or a material developed for one purpose be found to have diverse uses. We might say that bone is stiff for load bearing functions, but this property was to be important too, in connection with efficient sound transmission, during the evolution of the mammalian ear. For higher evolution generally, such function ambivalence has not been simply an odd side effect. It has been part of normal strategy. Above all it has provided means of escape from initial design approaches.³³⁰²

Miller offers another clear-cut example of emergents by comparing three different electronic systems:

One of these -- a wire connecting the poles of a battery -- can only conduct electricity, which heats the wire. Add several tubes, condensers, resistors, and controls, and the new system can become a radio, capable of receiving sound messages. Add dozens of other components, including a picture tube and several more controls, and the system becomes a television set, which can receive sound and a picture. And this is not just more of the same. The third system has emergent capabilities the second system did not have, emergent from its special design of much greater complexity, just as the second has capabilities the first lacked.³⁰⁷¹

How does all this relate to consciousness? A number of scientists today suspect that the phenomenon of consciousness may be an emergent arising naturally from the organizational complexity and processing efficiency found in the human brain. Neurobiologists recently have delved more deeply into the workings of the brain, and many have concluded that a general physiological theory of human consciousness soon may be possible. Dr. Gerald M. Edelman, Nobel. prize-winning immunologist from Rockefeller University in New York, has made a tentative step in this direction.³⁰⁰⁵ At a 1977 meeting of more than a hundred neuroscience researchers in Colorado, Edelman outlined his theory.²⁵⁶²

The human thinking organ, he claims, is not infinitely malleable as previously supposed. Instead, there are a large number of different kinds of neural circuits hardwired into the brain. These respond to input from each of the senses like a tuning fork stimulated with resonant vibrations. The hardwired circuit groups consist of aggregates of from 50 to 10,000 individual neurons (the human brain has a total of about 10 billion), and together comprise the "primary brain repertoire."

According to Edelman’s theory, the primary repertoire responds when the message to which it is susceptible is received. Such receipt causes the neuron group to emit its own signal, which is recognized in turn by a second level of neural groups called the "secondary brain repertoire." The secondary level equipment, presumably since it receives greater amounts of compounded and pooled data, lies at a deeper level of awareness than the primary sensory hookups.

Consciousness arises when impulses and patterns generated by the secondary repertoire are cycled around and fed back in as fresh input for other units in the secondary repertoire. While the primary system only responds to direct sensory data from the outside, the secondary system can also respond to internally-generated data as if it were externally-generated. This self-monitoring effect, according to Dr. Edelman, gives rise to human consciousness because it allows a review of internal states. In other words, the brain can watch itself work.

Science fiction writers are fond of pointing out that there may exist many different levels of awareness among the extraterrestrial races of our Galaxy.¹⁵⁴³ Perhaps the most classic example of this may be found in The Black Cloud, written by astronomer Fred Hoyle.⁶² In the novel it is suggested that natural grades of consciousness may exist, and that it is virtually impossible for a being at one level to comprehend the mentality of another being at a higher level of consciousness. In a similar vein, Carl Sagan draws a fanciful analogy from our relation to the insect world:

The manifestations of very advanced civilizations may not be in the least apparent to a society as backward as we, any more than an ant performing his anty labors by the side of a suburban swimming pool has a profound sense of the presence of a superior technical civilization all around him.¹⁵

These writers may not be far of the mark, for it appears quite possible that a variety of different grades of awareness may emerge at successively higher levels of organization and processing capability. Why is this so?

The essential characteristic of all intelligent systems constructed of matter-energy is that they process information. As noted earlier, smarter lifeforms tend to survive more often than dumber ones, so we should observe a strong evolutionary trend toward increasing intellect. Translating this into the language of information theory, we might say that the more bits per second a given creature can process, generally the more successful it will be and the stronger the evolutionary pressure to increase the bit rates that brains can handle. Furthermore, since more efficient organisms preferentially survive, all else being equal, there should also exist strong evolutionary tendencies to increase the efficiency of information processing -- that is, to process more information using less energy and less material supportive bulk.

If these notions are basically sound, then xenologists may define a "figure of merit" applicable to all sentiences in the universe, one which expresses both capacity and efficiency in a single number. This we shall call the Sentience Quotient (SQ). It is expressed. as the log₁₀ of the quotient of two numbers: The maximum bit rate a sentient creature can process per unit time interval (in bits/second), divided by the quantity of mass-energy the entity needs to do it (in kilograms).

What is the theoretical maximum SQ of any thinking entity in the universe? While this question may at first appear intractable, actually it is not. According to H.J. Bremermann, if energy levels are used as information markers (the most efficient markers imaginable) then the theoretical maximum amount of information that can be processed by a totally dedicated lump of matter is 1.4 x 10⁵⁰ bits/sec-kg.³⁰⁷² (See further discussion in Section 25.2.2.) An alien being capable of handling data this rapidly would have to be considered a "perfectly efficient" thinker. In any given mass category, such an entity would possess the greatest intelligence theoretically possible in this universe. Hence, the highest SQ is about log₁₀(1.4 x 10⁵⁰) ~ 50.

Consider, as a purely speculative hypothesis, that there may exist a natural order of awarenesses in the cosmos. At each higher level of mentality, a new kind of thought process emerges which is unique to mental systems of equal or higher values of SQ. That is, there may exist a number of higher-order intellectual emergents, analogous to but qualitatively vastly superior to consciousness.

What might these higher-order emergents be? The author’s own speculations are offered in Table 14.1 below. According to this scheme, the most primitive emergent of intelligence is simple "reactivity" -- the differentiation of body cells into specialized cells whose sole function is data processing. Perhaps this requires a minimum of 1 bit/sec-kg in the most primitive organisms.

Consciousness of the human type is the next highest emergent. Human brains have about 10¹⁰ neurons with about 10³ interconnections each and a bit rate on the order of 10³ bits/sec/neuron.³⁰⁷¹ But brains have tremendous redundancy; assuming a redundancy of 1:10⁴ and a body mass of about 100 kilograms, the human organism works out to about 10¹⁰ bits/sec-kg,³²³³ or SQ ~ 10. This seems near the minimum for the emergence of consciousness.

Taking similar steps of ten orders of magnitude for each new emergent to appear, at least four successively more sophisticated mental classes should exist above the level of ordinary human consciousness. The first of these is "communality," or the emergent of communal sentience discussed earlier in this chapter, perhaps at the 10²⁰ bits/sec-kg level. Second could be "hypersociality," a yet higher order of mentality capable of internalizing the processes, functions, and interrelationships between many different societies and species of sentient beings (10³⁰ bits/sec-kg). Third might be "galacticity," a single creature’s comprehension of the complexities of a galactic community (10⁴⁰ bits/ sec-kg). Finally there could be "universality," the ability of a single sentient entity to hold in its mind the seemingly incalculably complex orderings of an entire universe-full of living systems at all levels of intellectual sophistication (10⁵⁰ bits/sec-kg).

Naturally, at each higher level of data processing fewer data may be processed at that level. For instance, human consciousness can only handle in formation at about 0.1-1.0 bits/sec-kg,³⁰⁷¹ even though our brains may be able to process reactivity (nonconscious) data at much higher rates. Note also that a conscious brain-based entity such as a human can only process communal-level data at the rate of 10^-10 bits/sec-kg (because communality has not yet emerged), which perhaps helps to explain why humans have such great difficulty comprehending the intricate workings of the societies in which they live. Finally, note that an intelligent entity at any one level should also possess all simpler levels of awareness as well. Thus for example an hypersocial sentient ought to have communality and consciousness as well as simple reactivity.

Further implications of the Sentience Quotient concept in "first contact" situations are explored in greater detail in Section 25.3.

Last updated on 3 May 2010