On the origin of minds

From Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop:

But consciousness is not a power moonroof (you can quote me on that). Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. You cannot order a car with a two-cylinder motor and then tell the dealer, Also, please throw in Racecar Power^® for me. (To be sure, nothing will keep you from placing such an order, but don't hold your breath for it to arrive.) Nor does it make sense to order a car with a hot sixteen-cylinder motor and then to ask, Excuse me, but how much more would I have to throw in if I also want to get Racecar Power^®?

Like my fatuous notion of optional Racecar Power^®, which in reality is nothing but the upper end of a continuous spectrum of horsepower levels that engines automatically possess as a result of their design, consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. Fancy 100-huneker-and-higher racecar brains like yours and mine have a lot of self-perception and hence a lot of consciousness, while very primitive wind-up rubber-band brains like those of mosquitoes have essentially none of it, and lastly, middle-level brains, with just a handful of hunekers (like that of a two-year-old, or a pet cat or dog) come with a modicum of it.

Consciousness is not an add-on option when one has a 100-huneker brain; it is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel's strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you've got self, you've got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.

Hofstadter's analogy between consciousness and Racecar Power® succinctly explains what I find lacking about non-materialist criticisms of materialism. Just as you can tear apart a racecar engine block, grind it to metal shavings, and never once observe an atom of Racecar Power®, so too you should never expect to discover consciousness as a tangible entity anywhere in nature. But we don't go around claiming that Racecar Power® is an immaterial entity that defies materialist explanations; to the contrary, Racecar Power® is exactly engineered by precise and intentional exploitation of physical laws. So too consciousness is consequence of physical laws applied to plain, ordinary material stuff.

Nevertheless, I find Hofstadter's strange loop view of consciousness lacking. Though the view makes more sense of what I see than non-materialist views, it strikes me as being like guessing the right answer on a test: it doesn't show that we understand what's going on. As yet another analogy, the strange-loop view is like pre-Darwin ideas about evolution, which also were good guesses but guesses nevertheless.

It may surprise some people to know that ideas about evolution predate Darwin, but as far as we know, the idea goes back at least to the Greek philosopher Anaximander, who in the 6th century BC proposed that life began in the seas. Darwin's big contribution to the idea of evolution is the idea of natural selection. Natural selection provides the framework through which we can say how evolution occurs and even a little about what forms it takes. In other words, natural selection is the glue that binds evolution to falsifiability, transforming a weak explanation that says life changes to a stronger one that says life changes as a result of selective pressures of the environment. Pre-Darwin, ideas about evolution were speculative; post-Darwin, evolution serves as a framework that points us to explanations and further questions.

Materialist views of consciousness such as Hofstadter's strange loop are interesting but speculative. What's missing from them is consciousness's analog to evolution's natural selection—i.e, the driving force that explains how the emergent phenomenon works. As for what that analogous thing is, no one knows. But evolution as an idea was around for at least 2,300 years before Darwin entered the scene, and a theory of material consciousness may take as long or longer to emerge—though, if consciousness has no analog to evolution's Galapagos Islands, the problem may be intractable.