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observed privately, but this contradicts our introspective judgement that waking
awareness is qualitatively different from sleep or anaesthesia. One can admit the
temporal, evolution-enabled appearance of a fundamentally new primitive aspect of
the world, a creative emergent view (Alexander
1927
, Broad
1925
,Morgan
1931
),
but this is difficult to incorporate within ontological frameworks that posit timeless
sets of stable constituents. Or one can adopt a panpsychist view, with Spinoza and
Leibniz, that the evolved nervous systems combine in novel ways simple distinctions
that are inherent in the basic constituents of matter (Skrbina
2005
). Accordingly, we
could further divide creative emergence into the appearance of new structural and
functional primitives that require epistemological, but not ontological reframing,
and appearance of new, transcendent aspects of the world, such as the evolutionary
appearance of consciousness, which require both.
Attempting to produce emergent awareness in some artificially constructed sys-
tem is a highly uncertain prospect, because awareness is accessible only through
private observables. One has no means, apart from indirect structural-functional
analogy, of assessing success, i.e. whether any awareness has been brought into be-
ing. This is why even conscious awareness in animals, which have nervous systems
extremely similar to ours, is a matter of lively debate.
More practical than
de novo
creation of new forms of being is the creation of
new functions, which are both verifiable and useful to us—creativity as useful nov-
elty. To my mind, the most salient examples of functional emergence involve the
evolution of new sensory capabilities in biological organisms. Where previously
there may have been no means of distinguishing odours, sounds, visual forms or
colours, eventually these sensory capacities evolve in biological lineages. Each new
distinction becomes a relative primitive in an organism's life-world, its sensorimotor
repertoire.
Combinations of existing sensory distinctions do not create new primitive dis-
tinctions. We cannot directly perceive x-rays using our evolution-given senses, no
matter how we combine their distinctions. In Sect.
15.3
we outline how evolution-
ary robotic devices could adaptively evolve their own sensors and effectors, thereby
creating new primitives for sensorimotor repertoires.
Over the arc of evolution, the sensorimotor life-worlds of organisms have dra-
matically expanded. When a new sensory distinction or primitive action appears, the
dimensionality of the sensorimotor combinatorial repertoire space increases. In an
evolutionary landscape, the effective dimensionality of the fitness surfaces increases
as life-worlds become richer and there are more means through which organisms can
interact. Theoretical biologist Michael Conrad called this process “extradimensional
bypass” (Cariani
2002
, Chen and Conrad
1994
, Conrad
1998
).
The evolution of a new sensorimotor distinction and its dimensional increase
can actually simplify problems of classification and decision-making. For gradient-
ascending, hill-climbing optimisers, local maxima traps may become saddle points
in higher dimensional spaces that open up entirely new avenues for further ascent.
In the last decade, workers developing self-organising semantic webs for automated
computer search have proliferated features to produce sparse, high-dimensional re-
lational spaces (Kanerva
1988
) whose partitioning becomes tractable via regulari-
sation and linear classification techniques.
