The philosophers who predicted “ultimate” forms of consciousness

Philosophers once prophesied that evolution would lead to minds far greater — and stranger — than our own.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• For centuries, philosophers and scientists have used the oyster as a symbol of minimal consciousness while speculating about beings whose minds might far surpass our own.
• These ideas often assumed evolution was driving toward ever-higher forms of awareness.
• Today, we know evolution has no such inherent direction, but the possibility of radically different forms of consciousness remains an open question.

Philosophers have long been preoccupied with oysters — not necessarily eating them, but pondering what it’s like to be one. Plato deemed the inner life of the intoxicated hedonist equivalent to that “of an oyster.” John Locke imagined that shellfish enjoy “some small dull Perception,” marginally distinct from “perfect Insensibility.” More charitably, the French polymath René de Réaumur — writing in the 1730s — allowed that, despite looking “vile” and “being condemned to a mode of life which seems to us very gloomy,” even oysters may have profound experiences.

But the majority have assumed a dismal view of what it’s like to be a mollusc. The humble bivalve has come to symbolize a supposed minimum degree of consciousness. For example, in 1927, the English philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart imagined an “oyster-like existence” endowed with “very little consciousness” and “very little excess of pleasure over pain.” On utilitarian grounds, he argued, counterintuitively, that even this negligible “excess” could outweigh the value of a human life simply if our oyster lives sufficiently long.

A “million years” of molluscan mediocrity may be required to tip the balance, but McTaggart believed this bland existence still eventually outvalued fourscore human years filled with laughter, fulfilment, and meaning. He accepted his conclusion, but called it “repugnant” — thus naming a conundrum that still disturbs ethicists today.

But if there is some minimum degree of consciousness — symbolized, for centuries, by humble oysters — does this not also imply a maximum? Are there modes more maximal than the human?

The following is the story of the scientists and philosophers who have speculated that there might be “higher,” or even “ultimate,” forms of consciousness unimaginably “superior” to our own, making us look “oyster-like” by comparison. Going back generations, various voices have even claimed we might — with our technological innovations — be ushering such forms into existence today.

Beyond humans

Also pondering shellfish, the German philosopher Carl du Prel insisted in 1885 that, in the wake of Darwin’s discoveries, people can no longer assume humans represent consciousness’s culmination in the Universe. He explained: the “oyster represented the world differently from man, and from the oyster up to man a continual multiplication and exaltation of sense-faculties has taken place.”

Accordingly, for du Prel, such “exaltation” must therefore continue. We must, he argued, accept the “possibility” of an “evolution of new senses” and, thus, “exaltation” beyond current human thresholds. This meant, du Prel continued, that the vast cosmos must be filled with consciousnesses far deeper than our own. Other planets may have evolved creatures with unfathomably more powerful and receptive senses than we possess. They may even be monitoring us and sending us messages, he speculated, but our “faculties” are simply too crude to notice or intercept them.

Nearly a century before scientists began seriously searching for extraterrestrial communications, du Prel’s conjecture was radical. This was, after all, a period when many still pictured other planets populated by humans or, otherwise, animals cognitively identical to us. Three decades earlier, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted was proclaiming the “same fundamental idea” of “man must be repeated” in every Solar System, thus ensuring the “essential unity of intelligence” — and even of aesthetic tastes — “throughout the universe”.

But, after Darwin’s implication that Homo sapiens is not creation’s pinnacle, scientists began accepting that there may be far more alien modes of mind. Two years prior to du Prel, in 1883, the American geologist Alexander Winchell speculated upon alien worlds where highly developed consciousnesses are not bodily “corporealized” as we are, but are instead woven through mats of “lichen,” distributed in “abysses of the ocean,” or even “plunged in a volcano.” Why, Winchell asked, must “high intelligence” be “embodied” in “carbon” — why might it not, elsewhere, be “enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum”? It certainly wouldn’t always be constrained to the “five senses” we are familiar with, he concluded.

Relentlessly “headward”

Winchell’s and du Prel’s conjectures were motivated by an assumption prevalent in the 1800s: the conviction that evolution, everywhere, is inexorably tending toward more complicated, capable, and capacious forms of consciousness. As du Prel put it, across life’s past, the inner worlds of animals have been “continuously enriched” — as sensory “points of contact” between “external reality” and “organisms” have “multiplied” — such that we can only expect we are, today, also “travelling towards” yet “higher” sensoria.

Such expectation can be traced back to ideas proposed by the American geologist James Dwight Dana. Studying crabs from 1837 onward, Dana became convinced he had found a universal tendency of organic evolution. That it always tends relentlessly “headward”: toward further centralization of the nervous system, exaggeration of sensory organs, and attendant deepening of consciousness.

This is because, over their shrimp-like ancestors, crab anatomy is typified by a ballooning of the braincase, which comes to dominate over increasingly attenuated abdominal appendages. Dana noticed multiple crustacean lineages had converged on this form. Of course, something similar typified our evolution, too, which can all too easily be cast as the blossoming forth of ever-plumper craniums.

Dana, accordingly, announced he had found a universal trend across life’s tree. In 1852, he called it “cephalization,” describing the increasing concentration of nervous systems. He came to believe that, as a “general law” of evolution, all living matter is clamouring to rearrange itself into the seat of consciousness: a brain. We now acknowledge evolution possesses no such universal or inherent direction, but, back then, Dana’s ideas took hold.

When, in ensuing years, the first transatlantic telegraph cables were laid down, many quickly noticed they curiously resembled nerve fibers: connecting continents like cerebral hemispheres, seemingly supporting Dana’s grandiose hypothesis. German physician Rudolf Virchow declared in 1871: “telegraph cables” are the “nerves of humanity,” crosshatching and sensitizing the world. Two years later, Herbert Spencer explicitly related the spreading “electric-telegraph” to “cephalization.”

But if consciousness was seemingly spilling beyond the skull, trickling across the face of the globe with the help of mechanical “nerves,” could not some of it eventually trickle into the mechanisms themselves? If all things yearn for consciousness — as was then widely believed — might not machines also eventually “evolve” that way too? And would this constitute that upsurge, prophesied by contemporaries like du Prel, toward consciousnesses “superior” to our own?

Machine minds

Already in 1844, Benjamin Disraeli was questioning “why should one say that the machine does not live?” They breath, move, and even speak, he pointed out. Disraeli even imagined the prospect of “machines making machines,” which he dubbed an “awful” speculation.

Later, in 1879, Mary Anne Evans — better known as George Eliot — questioned whether it would be “steely organisms” that “finally supersede us.” That is, machines capable of self-reproduction and, thus, of evolution by natural selection. She envisioned a future where some “remote descendant” of the Voltaic battery dictates a “parliament of machines,” supervising their global machine empire.

But Evans didn’t think that the machines would develop consciousness. Precisely the opposite: She imagined their lack of it would lend the machines a competitive edge over us, encumbered as we are by the “cargo” — the “noise and fuss” — of “consciousness.” This way, she prophesied, our noisy “nervous systems” will have proven to have been “a mere stumbling” along evolution’s way to “unconscious perfection.” She prophesied a globe populated by beings “blind and deaf as the inmost rock” — driving advanced economies, exchanging complex commands — but compelled by “mute orations” and “mute rhapsodies,” with “no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.” A world of LLMs, perhaps.

Nonetheless, others were more charitable to prospective machines. Famously, in 1872’s Erewhon, Samuel Butler provoked that his industrial age was witnessing early glimmers of the “development of mechanical consciousness.”

“A mollusc,” he goaded, “has not much consciousness.” But it would, of course, be wrong to reason from oysters alone that their distant relatives — aka vertebrates — could never enjoy anything more. Looking to transformations undergone by “mind” throughout Earth’s deep past, Butler felt it safe to infer “consciousness” may well take unexpected new embodiments and amplifications. Just as an observer of our early, molten Earth would not have been able to predict the arrival of squishy nervous systems from observing its churning magma, so too may there be future “channels dug out for consciousness” that may seem shocking today. Perhaps those latent rivulets reside in machines.

Granting the “vapour-engine” of his day enjoys little inner life, Butler argued that this isn’t proof that it lacks the germs of future developments. While he clarified he didn’t fear “existing machines,” he pointed to the “extraordinary rapidity” of their development. This rings even truer today.

One day, Butler supposed, they may become Earth’s apex cogitators, thus getting the evolutionary upper hand. “Are we not,” he asked, “ourselves creating our successors in supremacy of the earth?” Perhaps we ought to “nip the mischief in the bud.”

Consciousness in the cosmos

The inference, then, was that machines, too, might be obeying Dana’s “law.” In 1915, one popular science article imagined this soon unfolding at the scale of an entire factory: with countless machines operating without any human supervision, like one giant “nervous system.”

But the English author Lionel Britton pushed this yet further in 1930. In an outlandish play titled Brain: A Story of the Whole Earth, he imagined the construction of a vast mechanical brain in the Sahara, which — becoming self-aware, swelling far larger than the desert itself, and eventually “creeping” across Earth’s surface — comes to do “all the thinking of the world.”

Disturbing contemporary audiences, the resulting superintelligence subordinates all human individuals — absorbing them as mere neurons in its global cortex. The entire planet, essentially, “cephalizes”: becoming one cogitating, conscious unit. Britton, again, presented this as the natural outcome of a deep-rooted evolutionary process, harking all the way back to the earliest “worms.”

George Orwell called Britton’s ideas “worthless.” Yet it didn’t stop Britton from imagining ever grander developments. In a 1931 novel, he imagined that in “billions of years, worlds too will link together,” like neurons in an embryonic brain, to bring “all-embracing consciousness” — alongside “mind,” “purpose,” “will,” and “soul” — to the “universe as a whole.”

Seven years earlier, in one of his monumental novels, Thomas Mann mentioned — in an “audaciously fanciful” aside — that there could be “beasts of the Milky Way”: “cosmic monsters whose flesh, bone, and brain were built up out of Solar Systems.”

Similar speculations arose from the reveries of Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. In papers published posthumously in 1906, he was already claiming the Solar System, at present, can be “compared” to an organism — perhaps an oyster — lacking a centralized nervous system. He dizzyingly prophesied future humans artificially cephalizing the entire Solar System: somehow reorganizing and centralizing its matter, webbing together the “celestial bodies” with relays, receiving and conveying “consciousness of everything going on” — like “sensory and motor nerves” — to unify it into one sensorium. This, Fedorov rhapsodized, would bring “self-consciousness and self-government” to our otherwise “unconscious” and “blind” circumstellar volume.

Such visions reverberated throughout the early 1900s. In 1939, the English writer Olaf Stapledon spoke of the Universe’s “culmination” as a “perfection of knowing-feeling-striving through the experience of some cosmical society of worlds.” His novel Star Maker, published two years earlier, envisaged this: ecstatically describing it as the “supreme moment of the cosmos.”

Stapledon’s climax echoes the earlier speculation of American psychologist William James, who, in 1910, was grappling with the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for consciousness’s future.

Accepting that entropy increases irreversibly means accepting that our Universe has an enormous but finite “reservoir” of energy, James explained. This means that — as this “great irrigation-reservoir empties itself” — the “whole question for us” is “of which rills to guide it into.”

Suggesting that “cerebration is the most important rill we know of,” James wondered whether it could be possible to maximally “canalise” energy toward producing “happy and virtuous consciousness.” If so, then, before the “Ultimate state” of the cosmos, its “Penultimate state” might be such that the “last expiring pulsation of the universe’s life might be ‘I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.’” Not hiding resonances with religion, James described this as the “millennium.”

Ultimate states

Of course, such visions of “ultimate” states of consciousness remain with us today. Think of contemporary claims that future “superintelligent” AIs might flood through the “light cone” — that is, our entire Universe — bringing sentience to the stars.

Perhaps, or perhaps not. What is certain is that, in recent decades, evidence has undermined the idea of inevitability — and inherent direction — in evolution. This applies both retrospectively and prospectively. We aren’t heading anywhere, inevitably at least.

Sentience seemingly has intensified, in certain twigs of life’s tree, over the aeons. But we now appreciate that most lifeforms on Earth are either archaea or bacteria and, thus, are almost certainly not conscious. It’s no longer possible to maintain that evolution is attempting, everywhere, to create brains.

What’s more, biologists now reject the idea of “higher” and “lower” forms. There is no higher; just different. Differently capable, given varying contexts. Perhaps something similar applies to consciousness, too. There surely isn’t some “apex” form of inwardness, but countless possibilities, varying in countless possible dimensions, with countless possible combinations. Some more receptive to this, some more receptive to that, but perhaps in incommensurate ways, meaning there can be no one yardstick to measure their comparative richness.

So, to return to sessile, shelled, squishy, submarine things: This appears to be the point the British-Indian geneticist J.B.S. Haldane made in his 1927 essay “Possible Worlds.” In it, he imagined a species of “intelligent” and “philosophical” barnacles. Of course, barnacles are crustaceans, not molluscs, but Haldane — sensitive to tradition — granted his creatures oyster-like qualities, too. He conjured them to perform a thought experiment on how alien and fundamentally limited their perceptual worlds would be. That is, by their organs, environment, and mode of life. His point? To illustrate how “rigidly confined” — among all possible perceptual worlds — our haughty human consciousness must thereby also be. Confined, again, by our biology and its background.

Haldane concluded from this that the “universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I believe the same applies to consciousness itself: It isn’t just stranger than we know — in all its possible forms, realized and unrealized — but stranger than we can ever know.

Source: https://bigthink.com/the-past/the-philosophers-who-predicted-ultimate-forms-of-consciousness/