Consciousness Is Fundamental

[Patterner]

It seems most people think consciousness is emergent:

Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.)

There are plenty of discussions from that stance. I would like to try to explore the idea that consciousness is fundamental.

Yes, there is overlap between this and my Proto-Conaciousness sub-forum. But that's only one possible explanation for consciousness being emergent. I would like to discuss the overall idea, rather than a particular explanation for it.

The idea is that consciousness is always present. In everything, everywhere, at all times. This answers two questions.

1) The Hard Problem of Consciousness. In Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness David Chalmers asks:

Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

The answer is, because consciousness is a fundamental property of our reality. We don't ask why things have mass, or charge. For the same reason, we don't need to ask why things are conscious. Of they're was nothing but the physical, it would all go on "in the dark." Why wouldn't it?

2) A widely discussed topic is where consciousness begins. Are all species of animals conscious? Are only species with certain features, or certain kind of brains, conscious? Are plants conscious? The answer is, all things are conscious. The question never need be asked.

The definition of consciousness is very important here. Of course, it is usually important. But I think moreso here. I know many will always think this is nonsense. But a definition could help with those willing to consider the idea.

In short:. Consciousness is subjective experience.

Really, that's it. Just raw, undifferentiated experience. But let me try to explain. I have an analogy. Think of consciousness like vision. I can look at a blank sheet of paper. I can look at the Grand Canyon. I can look at my wife. I can look at a Monet painting. I can look at a bolt of lightning racing across the sky. I can look at a blade of grass. My vision does not change depending on what I'm looking at. The things being looked at are what's different.

A rock experiences being a rock. What does that entail? Well, not much, from my point of view. A rock doesn't have any mental characteristics or processes. It doesn't think about being a rock. It doesn't have memories of being a rock. It doesn't have preferences of any sort, to any degree, in regards to anything. It doesn't have perceptions, of itself or anything other than itself. It doesn't even have any activity that's what we think of as purely physical. No part of a rock is moving relative to any other part of the rock.

A human experiences being a human. Being human entails very different things than being a rock. Humans have all kinds of perceptions, of ourselves and of things not ourselves. Tons of sensory input. Brains that process all that input, figuring out what it all means in order to thrive. We are information processing system upon information processing system, with feedback loop upon feedback loop. We manipulate our environment in attempts to benefit ourselves. These things are not human consciousness. Rather, these things are what we are consciousness of.

The consciousness of a rock and the consciousness of a human are not different kinds, or different degrees, of consciousness. It's the nature of the things experiencing their own existence that are different.

If consciousness is everywhere, then processes also experience their own existence. A tornado. An avalanche. A door closing. A ball flying through there air. Wood burning. But, as with any static physical thing, if there are no systems for things like thinking, memory, or making decisions, then there is no understanding or recognition of the experience, and no way of reporting what is experienced.

When I speak of experiencing being a human, I'm referring to experiencing the many processes of which we are composed. The physical brain and body are vital, to be sure. But my consciousness, my experience of myself, is not of ions and membranes, the molecules of neurotransmitters, the length and width of my neurons, or the shape of any structure of my brain. My consciousness is of my brain's activity. The processes. The physical brain and body are the medium of the information processing systems that make us what we are. But it is the processing that we think of as ourselves, and what we wouldn't give up.

The change from the ubiquitous consciousness to individual awareness, then self-awareness, begins with DNA.



IWhen one thing means something else, and an action takes place because of that relationship, the process is conscious. In humans, the many processes are intertwined, are feedback loops, and all function together as one unit. That unit experiences itself as a unit. Traditionally, we call this human consciousness, and many think human consciousness emerges from these processes. But "human consciousness" is actually the felt experience of those processes. Our self-awareness is the felt experience of feedback loops.







If everything subjectively experiences, then I have to think about building blocks and wholes. If an atom of iron experiences being an atom of iron, and it becomes part of a human, it is now part of the experiencing human. Obviously, the human experiences itself as a whole. Is it still experiencing itself as the atom? That idea might not be as crazy as it sounds. The famous split-brain phenomenon of having two consciousness units in one person, as well as confounded twins, are much more extreme than a particle retaining it's individual experience when it becomes part of a bigger unit.






According to this idea, any AI, like everything else, is already conscious. That is, there is subjective experience of being the machinery that has AI. It's a matter of what the AI is experiencing. What most people have usually thought of as "human consciousness" is actually the experience of all the things we are and do. No AI is or does anything close to that, so it can't experience that. Still, it experiences whatever it is. Electricity running through a system that processes certain kinds of information according to it's programming.




From Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged From Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is [/I]thinking[/I], the defining activity of a mind.

In Annaka Harris' audiobook Lights On, starting at 25:34 of Chapter 5 The Self (contributed), David Eagleman says:

I think conscious experience only arises from things that are useful to you. You obtain a conscious experience once signals makes sense. And making sense means it has correlations with other things. And, by the way, the most important correlation, I assert, is with our motor actions. Is what I do in the world. And that is what causes anything to have meaning.

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If things go as they so often do, someone will tell me why my analogy is flawed. Of course it's flawed. There's no such thing as a perfect analogy. If you find a perfect analogy, it means you are comparing identical things. Which is not the point of an analogy. An analogy is pointing out the common ground in different things.

Also, there can be no analogy between a physical thing or process, such as vision, and consciousness. Consciousness is not a physical thing.

In my analogy, a further objection might be that consciousness is a step removed from vision. It is the experience of the vision.