Brains working towards machine consciousness

 Liam Green-Hughes mentioned in a tweet that "I think though that society is nothing without individualism though, perhaps a controversial point :)" and it made me think it was about time I wrote something on the subject.

I have an interest in individuals awareness of themselves, amongst other things.  It seems to me that the individual awareness of oneself as a conscious independent agent is something which is learned through experience of others within a society.  When we are born, we start learning about how to make our bodies do things.  Actually, I don't think that is true at all, but it is a convenient representation of what happens from an adult, conscious, perspective.  I strongly suspect that we send random signals for quite a while, and learn which of them gives us negative, and which positive, feedback.  Anyway, while we are doing that, our environment includes the mundane, non-reactive objects we encounter, as well as those which have an independent agency about them.  Animals, parents, siblings, other people and, these days, various animated and generally noisy toys.

One of our first needs, apart from the obvious air, food, fluids, sanitation, warmth etc., is to pretty quickly learn to model what pleases, and what displeases, those giant creatures which inhabit our world - parents.  Straight forward survival needs mean that we have to be able to model what they are likely to do given different stimuli (and, to some extent, train them to respond appropriately to our needs!).  Much of early life is, I think, creating models of how things react, and if we can model how people react to stimuli we can work together rather than as individuals inhabiting the same space and competing for resources.

The problem is, we can never know exactly what stimuli someone (or something) else is experiencing, nor can we know what the sum-of-experience is that provides them with their own internal models.  Even if we are entirely behaviouristic animals the simplest way of modelling the Other is to ascribe some form of free-will and self-awareness to them.  It is a black box model, which allows our own internal modelling systems to take some shortcuts and guess what their behaviour will be on the basis of some abstractions from previous experience; a parameterisation of the 'other' to allow us to make timely predictions of what they might do next.

I think we do that, at least to a large extent, before we come to be fully self-aware of ourselves.  Furthermore, I think we then go on to model our own 'self' in the light of those we have grown up amongst.  This seems to be borne out by the rare cases of feral children which have been adequately reported, and it seems to be a relatively energy efficient way of organising our minds - we only need to develop the sense of self and ability to be independent once we start getting to a stage where we are also physically capable of surviving on our own.

So my thesis is that we have an emergent consciousness, coming out of a system which models other agents for the simple survival need of having to know what they are going to do, and then through self-similarity we recognise that we are similar to them, and consequently re-use the same modelling technique to provide ourselves with a model of our own minds.

So why was all that relevant?  I think Individualism is not possible without society. You cannot have the emphasis on independence, volition and self-reliance without first having a society to give you a model on which to build it.  The society need not be formal and regulated, of course.  And I would suspect that we would develop a broadly similar image of self even if we only had one 'role-model' on which to develop our internal model of self.

Individualism, if we get a little more semantic, is also a fairly reactionary stance to a more social form of self-concept.  In this sense too, it requires society in order to exist.  

However, I have much sympathy with Liam's comment; over-regulation by governing bodies takes away the flexibility and dynamic behaviours of a network.  Although the ethics of a society can be seen as being an emergent property coming out from the shared moralities of its members, and regulations can be seen as the embodiment of those ethics (in an ideal world, at least) in order to provide for justice to be done, when too many of these rules are created, the individual's response will tend to be to ignore those that they think they can get away with ignoring.