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From: Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA (Ken Laws)
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Emergent Consciousness
Message-ID: <12241790568.26.LAWS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 25-Sep-86 13:24:01 EDT
Article-I.D.: SRI-STRI.12241790568.26.LAWS
Posted: Thu Sep 25 13:24:01 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Sep-86 05:27:38 EDT
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Recent philosophical discussions on consciousness and intentionality
have made me wonder about the analogy between Man and Bureaucracy.
Imagine a large corporation.  Without knowing the full internal chain of
command, an external observer could still deduce many of the following
characteristics.

  1) The corporation is composed of hundreds of nearly identical units
     (known as personnel), most of whom perform material-handling
     or information-handling tasks.  Although the tasks differ, the
     processing units are essentially interchangeable.

  2) The "intelligence" of this system is distributed -- proper functioning
     of the organization requires cooperative action by many rational agents.
     Many tasks can be carried out by small cliques of personnel without
     coming to the attention of the rest of the system.  Other tasks require
     the cooperation of all elements.

  3) Despite the similarity of the personnel, some are more "central" or
     important than others.  A reporter trying to discover what the
     organization is "doing" or "planning" would not be content to talk
     with a janitor or receptionist.  Even the internal personnel recognize
     this, and most would pass important queries or problems to more central
     personnel rather than presume to discuss or set policy themselves.

  4) The official corporate spokesman may be in contact with the most
     central elements, but is not himself central.  The spokesman is only
     an output channel for decisions that occur much deeper or perhaps in a
     distributed manner.  Many other personnel seem to function as inputs or
     effectors rather than decision makers.

  5) The chief executive officer (CEO) or perhaps the chairman of the board
     may regard the corporation as a personal extension.  This individual
     seems to be the most central, the "consciousness" of the organization.
     To paraphrase Louis XV, "I am the state."


It seems, therefore, that the organization has not only a distributed
intelligence but a localized consciousness.  Certain processing elements
and their own thought processes control the overall behavior of the
bureaucracy in a special way, even though these elements (e.g., the CEO)
are physiologically indistinguishable from other personnel.  They are
regarded as the seat of corporate consciousness by outsiders, insiders,
and themselves.

Consciousness is thus related to organizational function and information
flow rather than to personal function and characteristics.  By analogy,
it is quite possible that the human brain contains a cluster of simple
neural "circuits" that constitute the seat of consciousness, even though
these circuits are indistinguishable in form and individual functioning
from all the other circuits in the brain.  This central core, because of
its monitoring and control of the whole organism, has the right to
consider itself the sole autonomous agent.  Other portions of the brain
would reject their own autonomy if they were equipped to even consider
the matter.

I thus regard consciousness as a natural emergent property of hierarchical
systems (and perhaps of other distributed systems).  There is no need to
postulate a mind/body dualism or a separate soul.  I can't explain how
this consciousness arises, nor am I comfortable with the paradox.  But I
know that it does arise in any hierarchical organization of cooperating
rational agents, and I suspect that it can also arise in similar organizations
of nonrational agents such as neural nets or computer circuitry.

					-- Ken Laws
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