The learning-consciousness connection

Abstract

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought (HOT) theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate.

Stimulus Awareness is Necessary for Both Instrumental Learning and Instrumental Responding to Previously Learned Stimuli

“…This evidence, and the above considerations, have implications for understanding the function of consciousness, supporting the notions that adaptive behaviours, where selective and flexible decision-making is involved, require consciousness for successful operation. Complex forms of learning (including trace conditioning, second-order conditioning, or flexible re-learning) have been considered to share overlapping markers with the hallmarks of consciousness, suggesting that the two may be evolutionarily intertwined (Birch et al, 2020;Birch et al, 2021;Ginsburg and Jablonka, 2019). Elsewhere, consciousness has been closely tied to action, providing a frame of reference for individuals' interactions with the world (Clark, 2016;Land, 2012;Merker, 2005;Seth et al, 2016).…”

Stimulus awareness is necessary for both instrumental learning and instrumental responding to previously learned stimuli

“…This evidence, and the above considerations, have implications for understanding the function of consciousness, supporting the notions that adaptive behaviours, where selective and flexible decision-making is involved, require consciousness for successful operation. Complex forms of learning (including trace conditioning, second-order conditioning, or flexible re-learning) have been considered to share overlapping markers with the hallmarks of consciousness, suggesting that the two may be evolutionarily intertwined (Birch, Ginsburg, & Jablonka, 2021Ginsburg & Jablonka, 2019). Elsewhere, consciousness has been closely tied to action, providing a frame of reference for individuals' active interactions with the world (Clark, 2016;Land, 2012;Merker, 2005;Seth et al, 2016).…”

Dimensions of well-being

“…To some extent the history of the welfare laws in countries like the UK reflects changes in reasoned beliefs about the distribution of sentience in animals. I have been associated for the last three years with the Foundations of Animal Sentience project led by Jonathan Birch (Birch et al 2021), whose team prepared the scientific document on the basis of which extension of welfare laws in the UK to some invertebrate groups is now applied.…”

“…If one accepts this view, the animals belonging to these groups have to be considered as moral patients, and welfare-affect considerations, minimally the minimization of pain, should be applied to them. The recent document written by Birch et al (2021), which offers partially overlapping criteria that are focused on the ability to experience pain, goes in this direction. According to this document and the act it is now based on it, welfare considerations, which at present are confined to vertebrates, should be extended to decapod crustaceans (an order of invertebrate animals of the crustacean subphylum containing around 15,000 species, including the true crabs, lobsters, crayfish, and true shrimps) and to the cephalopods (a class of around 750 species in the mollusk phylum, including all species of octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus).…”

“…An evolutionary transition marker is a property that when we find evidence of it we have evidence that the major evolutionary transition in which we are interested has been completed. The transition marker allows us to reverse-engineer to the system that enables it (Ginsburg and Jablonka 2015, 2019; Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka 2020, 2021). For the case of minimal life, the evolutionary transition marker is the capacity for unlimited (open-ended) heredity.…”