Beyond the Hard Problem: IX. The Child Who Becomes Conscious

In the previous post, we followed consciousness backwards through evolutionary history.

Physical organisation became biological organisation.

Biological organisation developed systems of value and mattering.

Some organisms developed increasingly complex nervous systems.

Some developed primary consciousness.

Social organisation transformed the possibilities of organismic life.

And eventually, in our lineage, semiotic organisation became extraordinarily elaborate.

But evolution has another dimension.

The history of consciousness is not only the history of species.

It is also the history of the individual organism.

Every human adult was once a child.

And the child did not begin with the consciousness of the adult.

The adult is not the starting point

This seems obvious.

Yet it is surprisingly easy to forget when we philosophise about consciousness.

The typical thought experiment begins with a mature human being.

The adult brain is already organised.

The adult can speak.

The adult can reflect.

The adult can report experiences.

The adult can ask what it is like to be conscious.

And then we abstract.

But development gives us a very different picture.

The human infant begins as a biological organism with extraordinary capacities, but without the language of the adult.

There is no fully formed philosophical subject waiting inside the infant to discover the appropriate vocabulary.

The adult form of consciousness develops.

And it develops in relation to other people, to the body, to the environment and, crucially, to language.

This means that consciousness itself has an ontogenesis.

Before language

Halliday's account of language development provides a particularly interesting way into this problem.

The child does not simply move from silence to adult language.

There is an intermediate stage: what Halliday calls the protolanguage.

The protolanguage is already a system of meaning.

It allows the child to make distinctions and perform functions in relation to others before the grammar of the adult language has developed.

This is important because it gives us a developmental space between purely biological responsiveness and mature symbolic language.

The child is already participating in meaning.

But the meanings available are not yet organised in the elaborate grammatical system of adult language.

The child's semiotic resources develop.

And as they develop, the child's possibilities for construing experience develop with them.

Language does not arrive after consciousness

This gives us a different relationship between consciousness and language.

The conventional picture might be:

1. consciousness exists;

2. the child experiences things;

3. language is acquired;

4. language is used to describe those experiences.

On this picture, language is essentially an expressive instrument.

It gives names to things that consciousness already knows.

But Halliday's developmental account suggests something much more interesting.

Language does not merely express an already completed consciousness.

Language participates in the development of consciousness.

The child acquires new semiotic resources for making distinctions.

Those distinctions make new forms of experience available for attention.

Relations can be recognised.

Events can be connected.

People can be distinguished.

Actions can be remembered.

Possibilities can be anticipated.

The child is not simply learning how to talk about a world already fully understood.

The child is developing new ways of construing that world.

When higher-order consciousness becomes possible

This is where Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness becomes especially useful.

Primary consciousness does not require language.

A human infant can therefore be conscious before possessing the linguistic resources of the adult.

But higher-order consciousness involves something more.

The organism becomes capable of representing aspects of its own experience in ways that can extend beyond immediate perception and action.

Language makes possible new kinds of temporal, social and self-referential organisation.

The child can begin to construe not merely what is happening but what happened, what might happen, what someone else thinks happened, and what the child itself thinks about what happened.

The possibilities expand rapidly.

Consciousness has not suddenly appeared.

It has become more elaborately organised.

Experience becomes construable

This is the point at which Halliday's theory gives us a particularly powerful insight.

Experience is not simply something that consciousness possesses and language subsequently labels.

Experience becomes accessible to the developing human consciousness through the resources of meaning.

The child learns to construe experience as processes, participants, qualities, circumstances and relations.

Something that was previously simply lived can become something that can be distinguished.

Something that was distinguished can become something that can be related to something else.

Something that can be related can become something that can be remembered, anticipated and discussed.

Language therefore does not merely add names to experience.

It reorganises the possibility space of experience.

Grammatical metaphor changes the game

The transformation becomes even more dramatic with the development of grammatical metaphor.

This is one of Halliday's most important insights into the development of mature language.

In congruent expression, experience is construed in ways that are relatively close to the organisation of the processes being described.

But language can reconstrue those meanings.

Processes can become things.

Qualities can become entities.

Relations can become objects of thought.

Clauses can become nominal groups.

The language can therefore turn its own previous meanings into resources for further meaning-making.

This is more than stylistic variation.

It creates new possibilities for thought.

A process can become something we can compare.

An event can become an object of explanation.

A relationship can become a concept.

An entire proposition can become something that can be questioned.

Language begins to provide resources for consciousness to operate upon its own prior constructions.

That is a remarkable development.

Consciousness becomes reflexive

This may be one of the places where higher-order consciousness becomes particularly distinctive.

The organism can become aware not merely of the world but of its own constructions of the world.

It can ask:

What do I think?

Why do I think it?

What did I experience?

What does that experience mean?

What did I mean?

What does meaning mean?

The system becomes capable of turning its own semiotic activity into an object of semiotic activity.

This is not simply more information.

It is a transformation in the organisation of possibility.

The child becomes capable of inhabiting increasingly abstract relations among meanings.

And eventually, of thinking about consciousness itself.

The child who becomes conscious

We can therefore now formulate the developmental question differently.

The interesting question is not:

When does the child become conscious?

There is no obvious single moment.

Rather:

How does the child's form of consciousness change as the child's semiotic resources develop?

Primary consciousness may be present early.

Social responsiveness is present early.

Meaning begins to develop through the protolanguage.

The child's language expands.

Grammar becomes increasingly powerful.

Experience becomes increasingly differentiated through meaning.

And eventually grammatical metaphor permits meanings themselves to become resources for further meaning.

The child becomes capable of a form of consciousness that can reflect upon its own constructions.

This is a history.

And it is a history that the adult thought experiment erases.

The zombie revisited

We can now see the philosophical zombie from another angle.

The zombie is defined as an adult human duplicate.

But the adult human is not merely a physical arrangement.

It is the outcome of a developmental trajectory.

Its nervous system developed.

Its body developed.

Its social relations developed.

Its language developed.

Its meanings developed.

Its capacity to construe experience developed.

Its capacity to reflect upon those constructions developed.

To reproduce the adult physical and functional organisation while subtracting consciousness therefore looks increasingly peculiar.

What exactly is being held constant?

If language and consciousness have developed together, can we really assume that the physical-functional description of the mature organism captures everything that the developmental trajectory has produced?

Perhaps.

But it can no longer simply be taken for granted.

The developmental history has become part of the question.

Ontogenesis and phylogenesis

There is also a deeper connection here.

The child's development occurs within the evolutionary history of the species.

The child inherits a nervous system shaped by evolution.

It enters a social world made possible by that history.

It enters a language that existed before it.

It acquires meanings developed collectively by previous generations.

And then it transforms those resources through its own experience.

Ontogenesis therefore does not repeat phylogenesis.

But neither is it independent of it.

The child's possibilities are constrained and enabled by the evolutionary, bodily, social and semiotic organisation into which the child is born.

The individual becomes conscious within a world that has already become meaningful.

This is very different from imagining consciousness as an isolated property that somehow appears inside an otherwise complete physical system.

A different kind of emergence

We can now see why the language of emergence needs care.

If consciousness develops through organismic, social and semiotic relations, we should not imagine that it simply pops into existence when enough complexity has accumulated.

The more interesting possibility is reorganisation.

Primary consciousness is reorganised through social participation.

Social experience is reorganised through language.

Language is reorganised through increasingly abstract grammatical resources.

And those resources allow consciousness to operate upon meanings that arose from its own previous activity.

At each stage, something new becomes possible without the earlier level disappearing.

The biological organism remains.

Primary consciousness remains.

Social relations remain.

Language does not replace them.

It reorganises what can be done with them.

The adult is a late phenomenon

The significance of this for the hard problem is considerable.

The human adult is an extremely late product of a very long history.

If we begin our theory of consciousness with the adult, we begin near the end of the story.

We then treat everything that preceded that endpoint as background.

But perhaps the background is the explanation we need.

The organism.

The body.

Biological value.

Primary consciousness.

Social organisation.

Protolanguage.

Language.

Grammatical metaphor.

Higher-order consciousness.

These are not necessarily separate stages in a simple sequence.

They are layers of organisation in a developing system.

And each layer changes the possibilities available to the others.

From consciousness to meaning

We have now reached a particularly interesting point.

The hard problem asks about subjective experience.

But the human being does not have philosophical access to experience in some pure, pre-semiotic form.

We experience.

We attend.

We remember.

We distinguish.

And then, through language, we construe what we have experienced.

The moment we say pain, redness, music, fear, joy or consciousness, we are already operating within a semiotic system.

This does not mean that experience is reducible to language.

It means that our access to experience as an object of consciousness is mediated by meaning.

And that raises a question that will take us further still.

What if the “qualia” that seem to provide the hardest evidence for the irreducibility of consciousness are already partly the result of the semiotic construal through which we have made them available for reflection?

That is not to say that the experience is unreal.

Quite the opposite.

It is to ask whether we have mistaken the construal of experience for experience in isolation.

The distinction will be crucial.

Because the next step is to ask what happens when experience becomes meaning.

Beyond the Hard Problem: VIII. The Evolution Into Consciousness

We have now moved a considerable distance from the hard problem.

We began with the distinction between physical function and phenomenal experience.

We then questioned the philosophical zombie, restored the organism, introduced biological value, and considered Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness.

We have seen that consciousness need not begin with language.

We have also seen that social and semiotic organisation can transform what consciousness can become.

The next question is therefore unavoidable.

How did any of this become possible in the first place?

If consciousness is a natural phenomenon, it must belong to some natural history.

And that history begins long before human beings could ask what consciousness was.

Evolution begins before the question

The hard problem tends to present us with a completed contrast.

On one side is the physical world.

On the other is conscious experience.

The question is how one could possibly give rise to the other.

But evolution does not begin with either side of that contrast.

It begins with processes that precede the distinction.

There is a physical world.

Then there are living systems.

Those living systems maintain themselves.

They interact with their environments.

Some differences matter to them.

They evolve.

Their interactions become increasingly complex.

Some develop nervous systems.

Some become social.

Some develop elaborate systems of communication.

Some eventually develop language.

And some become capable of asking philosophical questions about consciousness.

The human capacity to formulate the hard problem is therefore not the starting point of the story.

It is one of its very late consequences.

From physical to biological

Halliday's broad taxonomy of complex systems offers a useful way of representing this change:

physical → biological → social → semiotic

It should not be read as a simple ladder in which one level disappears when the next appears.

A biological system remains physical.

A social system remains biological and physical.

A semiotic system remains social, biological and physical.

What changes is the organisation of the relations.

Later forms include and reorganise earlier ones.

This gives us a useful alternative to the idea that consciousness must somehow be added to matter.

Perhaps the more interesting question is what becomes possible when physical organisation becomes biological organisation, and what becomes possible again when biological organisation becomes social and semiotic.

The mystery is not simply the appearance of something from nothing.

It is the transformation of possibilities.

Evolution does not select descriptions

There is another reason this matters.

Natural selection does not select abstract physical descriptions.

It selects organisms in environments.

An organism survives or fails according to what happens to the organism.

Food matters.

Temperature matters.

Predators matter.

Reproduction matters.

Social relationships matter.

The organism is therefore already situated within a field of biological significance before anything like human meaning exists.

This gives evolution a direction that is invisible in a purely physical description.

Physical events occur.

But biological systems are organised around the consequences of those events.

The difference between a harmless change and a fatal one is not a difference in the laws of physics.

It is a difference in what the event means for the organism's continued organisation—or, before meaning in the semiotic sense, in what it matters as.

From mattering to consciousness

At some point in evolutionary history, nervous systems became possible.

They allowed organisms to integrate increasingly complex patterns of sensory and motor activity.

They could discriminate.

They could learn.

They could remember.

They could anticipate.

They could coordinate action.

According to Edelman's framework, some organisms eventually possessed primary consciousness.

Exactly how this transition occurred remains an open scientific and philosophical question.

And it should remain open.

The important point for our present argument is methodological.

We do not need to imagine consciousness suddenly appearing in an otherwise complete physical system.

We can ask instead what new possibilities became available as biological organisation became increasingly capable of integrating the organism's relations with its environment.

Perhaps consciousness emerged.

Perhaps some form of consciousness is more deeply woven into nature.

Perhaps the distinction between emergence and fundamentality will itself need revision.

But all these possibilities now belong to an evolutionary space.

What did evolution actually change?

This question is surprisingly difficult.

We are accustomed to describing evolution in terms of new structures and functions.

But perhaps another description is needed.

Evolution changes what an organism can discriminate.

It changes what it can respond to.

It changes what matters.

It changes what it can learn.

It changes what it can remember.

It changes what it can anticipate.

It changes how it can coordinate with others.

It changes the kinds of world an organism can inhabit.

A bat does not merely possess a different sensory apparatus from a human.

It inhabits a different field of possible distinctions.

An octopus does not simply have more or fewer capacities than a dog.

Its body, nervous system and ecological relations make different forms of organisation possible.

Consciousness, if it is related to such capacities, should therefore not be imagined as a single substance distributed across different organisms.

It may be better understood as a family of possibilities realised differently through different evolutionary histories.

The evolutionary significance of embodiment

This is where the body becomes important again.

Evolution does not produce brains in isolation.

It produces organisms.

Bodies and nervous systems evolve together.

Sensory systems develop in relation to the ways organisms move and act.

Motor capacities alter what can be perceived.

Ecological niches alter what distinctions matter.

The organism changes its environment, which changes the conditions under which subsequent evolution occurs.

There is therefore no obvious point at which we can isolate a brain from the organism and declare:

Here is the physical system.

Now explain the experience.

The evolutionary unit is relational.

The organism exists in an environment.

Its nervous system is part of its body.

Its body is part of its mode of life.

And its mode of life is part of its evolutionary history.

The phenomenon we call consciousness belongs somewhere within that entire history.

Evolution into consciousness

This suggests a subtle change in wording.

Instead of asking:

How did consciousness evolve?

we might ask:

How did organisms evolve into forms for which consciousness became possible?

The difference is important.

The first formulation makes consciousness sound like a trait waiting to appear.

The second directs attention towards the transformations that made the trait—or whatever consciousness turns out to be—possible.

What changed in the organisation of life?

What new relations became available?

What forms of biological value emerged?

What kinds of neural integration became possible?

What ecological and social conditions favoured them?

What kinds of primary consciousness followed?

The question becomes developmental in an evolutionary sense.

We are interested not only in the appearance of a property, but in the changing possibility space of organisms.

No single staircase

There is a danger here too.

Once we see a sequence such as

physical → biological → social → semiotic

we may be tempted to turn it into a universal evolutionary staircase.

That would be a mistake.

Evolution has no obligation to follow our conceptual taxonomy.

Not every lineage becomes highly social.

Not every social organism develops a complex semiotic system.

Not every organism with sophisticated cognition develops anything like human language.

And the relations between biological, social and semiotic organisation are not necessarily linear.

They can interact.

They can constrain one another.

They can open new possibilities.

They can also close possibilities.

The taxonomy is therefore best understood as a map of forms of organisation, not as a timetable of evolutionary progress.

The emergence of the social

Nevertheless, the emergence of social organisation is transformative.

Once organisms live in structured relations with one another, the possibilities of biological significance expand.

Another organism becomes not merely predator or prey but partner, rival, offspring, ally, teacher or object of imitation.

Behaviour becomes socially consequential.

Communication becomes possible.

Learning can become social.

The organism's world becomes increasingly populated by distinctions that depend upon relationships among organisms.

This is a major change in the possibility space.

And it prepares the ground for the next transformation:

the organisation of significance itself.

The emergence of the semiotic

A semiotic system does something more than transmit signals.

It provides resources for construing relations as meanings.

This means that once semiotic organisation develops, an organism can participate in a world where distinctions are not merely biologically significant but can be systematically construed.

The difference is profound.

A signal can alter behaviour.

A sign can enter a system of meaning.

A social organism can respond to what another organism does.

A semiotic organism can construe what another organism does as something.

And once experience can be construed as something, it can become available for further construal.

This creates possibilities that were not present at earlier levels.

The system can begin, in a sense, to operate upon its own constructions.

That will become crucial when we return to human ontogenesis.

The evolutionary problem for the hard problem

We can now turn the hard problem around.

Suppose phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally different from physical organisation.

How does that distinction fit into evolutionary history?

When did the difference become relevant?

How could natural selection act upon organisms whose behaviour was partly determined by a property that could not be captured in physical or functional description?

How does a fundamentally non-physical phenomenon enter a process in which organisms reproduce, vary and are selected?

These are not objections to Chalmers's position.

They are questions his position must accommodate.

Conversely, if consciousness emerges from physical organisation, we need to know what kind of emergence is involved.

And if consciousness is fundamental, we need to understand what that fundamentality means in a universe whose conscious organisms nevertheless have a history.

The evolutionary question therefore does not settle the metaphysics.

It disciplines it.

Whatever consciousness is, it has to be compatible with the fact that organisms with different forms of consciousness arose through evolutionary history.

Perhaps the phenomenon is the trajectory

There is another possibility.

Perhaps we have been asking whether consciousness is a property of an organism when we should be asking about the trajectory through which the organism becomes capable of the forms of consciousness it possesses.

The adult organism is not simply a finished object.

It is the current state of a history.

The human brain is the current state of an evolutionary history and an individual developmental history.

Its capacities are inseparable from the relations through which they arose.

This does not mean that history explains everything.

But it does mean that an explanation which removes history before beginning may be removing part of the phenomenon.

The zombie was frozen.

The organism evolves.

And between those two facts lies a great deal of what the hard problem leaves unexplored.

From phylogenesis to ontogenesis

We have now followed one trajectory:

from physical organisation,

to biological organisation,

to mattering,

to increasingly differentiated nervous systems,

to primary consciousness,

to social organisation,

to semiotic possibility.

But there is another trajectory that now demands attention.

The evolutionary history of consciousness is not merely a history of species.

It is also present in every individual organism.

A human child does not inherit adult consciousness fully formed.

The child develops.

And in human development, something extraordinary happens.

A biological organism enters a social world, develops an early semiotic system, and gradually acquires increasingly powerful resources for construing experience.

Eventually, language becomes capable of construing experience in increasingly abstract ways.

Consciousness itself is transformed.

So perhaps the next question is not merely:

How did evolution produce organisms capable of consciousness?

It is:

How does an individual organism become the kind of conscious being that can think about its own experience?

That is the question of ontogenesis.

And it takes us directly to the child.

Beyond the Hard Problem: VII. The Social Life of Consciousness

In the previous post, we left the human subject behind.

Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness allowed us to consider consciousness as something with a much longer natural history than human language.

An animal does not need a word for danger in order for danger to matter.

It does not need a concept of pain in order to experience injury.

It does not need a theory of itself in order to be conscious.

But this does not mean that language and consciousness are unrelated.

It means something more interesting.

Language may not create consciousness. It may transform what consciousness can become.

And to see why, we need to take seriously the social life of organisms.

Consciousness is not a solitary achievement

Living organisms are relational from the beginning.

They exist in environments.

Many exist among other organisms.

They compete, cooperate, reproduce, care for offspring, defend territory, follow one another, imitate, warn and coordinate.

Social organisation therefore changes the field in which biological value operates.

Another organism is not simply another object in the environment.

It may be food, predator, mate, offspring, rival, companion or collaborator.

Its behaviour matters.

And the organism's own behaviour can matter to it in return.

The social world is therefore already a world of significance.

It does not yet follow that it is a semiotic world in the fully developed human sense.

But it creates the conditions under which increasingly elaborate systems of signalling and coordination can evolve.

Signals before signs

This returns us to the distinction between mattering and meaning.

A signal can matter without functioning as a symbol in a human language.

A warning call can alter the behaviour of other animals.

A courtship display can alter the behaviour of a potential mate.

A movement can coordinate a group.

A facial expression can affect another individual's behaviour.

The signal does something because of the social organisation within which it occurs.

It need not be a proposition.

It need not represent an abstract concept.

Its significance may lie in the difference it makes to the ongoing behaviour of the participants.

This is why the emergence of social signalling should not be treated as the sudden appearance of language.

There is a considerable space between nothing means anything and human symbolic language.

That intermediate space matters.

A social semiotic possibility

Halliday's work gives us a particularly useful way of thinking about this.

For Halliday, language is not primarily a collection of labels attached to pre-existing things.

It is a social semiotic system.

Its fundamental role is to create resources for making meaning within social life.

This makes the emergence of language inseparable from the emergence of new kinds of social relation.

A social semiotic system does not merely transmit information between already formed individuals.

It changes what individuals can do with one another.

And therefore it changes what they can do with experience.

This suggests that the evolution of social communication should not be viewed simply as an increase in the amount of information available to an organism.

It may represent an expansion of the possibility space of significance.

From signal to meaning

There is no need to imagine a single moment when a signal suddenly becomes a sign.

Evolution rarely works that way.

A signal can initially be tightly coupled to a particular biological response.

Over time, however, social systems can differentiate, stabilise and reorganise such signals.

What matters is no longer only the immediate physical event.

The participants can begin to respond to what another organism is doing as part of an organised pattern of social behaviour.

The signal becomes increasingly embedded in a system of relations.

At some point in such a trajectory, we can begin to speak more confidently of semiotic organisation.

But even here, we should resist the temptation to draw an absolute line.

Meaning can be more or less differentiated.

Social systems can be more or less elaborate.

The relevant question is not:

When did meaning suddenly appear?

It is:

What new possibilities became available when social differences could themselves become systematically significant?

Consciousness in a social world

This matters for consciousness because an organism's world is partly shaped by the relations in which it participates.

A solitary organism has one kind of world.

An organism living in a complex social group has another.

The latter must respond not merely to physical conditions but to the behaviour of others.

And the behaviour of others can itself become something to discriminate.

An animal may learn what another individual is likely to do.

It may distinguish individuals.

It may remember previous interactions.

It may anticipate future interactions.

It may modify its behaviour according to what others are doing.

None of this requires human language.

But it does suggest that social organisation can transform the structure of primary consciousness.

The world becomes more differentiated because the organism's relations become more differentiated.

The importance of the protolanguage

This is where Halliday's notion of protolanguage becomes suggestive.

Halliday's protolanguage belongs specifically to the development of the human child.

It is the early semiotic system through which the child begins to construct meanings before entering the full grammar of the adult language.

We should therefore be careful about simply projecting the term onto other species.

A bird's calls, a bee's dance or a primate's social signals are not thereby human protolanguages.

But Halliday's concept points towards a more general possibility:

meaning can begin in a much simpler social semiotic organisation than mature language.

The significance of this possibility is not that animals secretly possess miniature human languages.

It is that consciousness may develop within social worlds that already possess structured systems of significance.

The human protolanguage is one particularly consequential form of such organisation.

And because it develops within the child rather than being simply imposed from outside, it gives us a clue about the relation between social semiotics and consciousness.

The child changes the question

The child is not born into a meaningless world and subsequently taught the names of things.

The child enters a social world already saturated with significance.

People respond to the child.

They interpret gestures.

They anticipate needs.

They establish routines.

They distinguish actions, objects, people and events.

And the child gradually develops semiotic resources for participating in this world.

In Halliday's account, the child's early language is not simply a defective version of adult language.

It is an evolving system of meaning.

As that system develops, the possibilities for construing experience change.

The child does not merely acquire more words.

The child acquires new ways of making distinctions.

And new distinctions make new forms of experience available for reflection.

The social construction of possibility

This gives us another sense in which consciousness has a social life.

The social world does not simply provide information that an already complete consciousness processes.

It can provide new possibilities for consciousness itself.

A child learns to distinguish things that previously were not distinguished.

Relations that were previously lived can become recognised.

Events that were previously experienced can become remembered, narrated and compared.

The self can become an object of interaction.

Another person's perspective can become something to consider.

Eventually, one's own thoughts can become objects of thought.

This is not merely more information.

It is a reorganisation of the space in which experience can be construed.

And this is where higher-order consciousness begins to look less like an inexplicable addition to primary consciousness and more like a transformation of its possibilities.

But language does not make experience

We should nevertheless preserve an important distinction.

Language does not create the experience it construes.

The pain comes before the word pain.

The colour is experienced before the child can use the word red.

The infant does not need grammar before anything can matter.

Semiotic systems do something different.

They make experience construable.

They provide resources through which what happens can become something that can be distinguished, related, remembered, shared and reflected upon.

This is a crucial difference.

Meaning is not simply experience with labels attached.

It is a new level of organisation of experience.

And once that organisation becomes sufficiently elaborate, consciousness acquires new possibilities.

From primary to higher-order consciousness

We can now see Edelman's distinction in a broader context.

Primary consciousness can arise without language.

But a social semiotic system can reorganise the possibilities available to a conscious organism.

The organism can become able to construe its own states.

It can participate in meanings that are not reducible to immediate biological value.

It can construct relations across time.

It can distinguish what happened from what might happen.

It can make its own previous experience available for further experience.

And eventually, through language, it can talk about consciousness itself.

This is not a transition from unconsciousness to consciousness.

It is a transition in the organisation of consciousness.

The difference is profound.

A wider possibility space

The hard problem asks why physical processing should ever produce experience.

The evolutionary and social questions we have been following ask something different.

What happens when organisms become systems for which things matter?

What happens when conscious organisms live in social worlds?

What happens when social interaction becomes increasingly semiotic?

What happens when experience becomes something that can be construed, shared and reflected upon?

These questions do not eliminate the distinction between physical organisation and experience.

They put that distinction into a history.

And perhaps that is what has been missing.

Consciousness may not have appeared all at once.

It may have acquired new forms as organisms acquired new ways of relating to their worlds and to one another.

Primary consciousness is therefore not simply an inferior version of human consciousness.

It may be the foundation upon which radically different forms of consciousness can develop.

The human form is one such development.

Perhaps a particularly extraordinary one.

But it is not the starting point.

From the social to the semiotic

We are now approaching the boundary that matters most for this series.

The biological organism has a world of mattering.

The social organism has a world increasingly structured by the behaviour of others.

The social semiotic organism has something more:

a world in which significance can itself become organised as meaning.

That changes the possibilities again.

And when meaning becomes sufficiently powerful, something remarkable happens.

Experience can cease merely to be something that happens.

It can become something that can be construed.

That is the point at which the evolutionary story of consciousness intersects with Halliday's account of language.

But before we turn to the human child, there is a larger question to address.

All of these developments occurred within a history that began long before language.

So if consciousness has a natural history, where does that history begin?

Not with the hard problem.

Not with qualia.

Not with language.

It begins with life itself.

The next question is therefore the evolutionary one:

What might it mean to evolve into consciousness from a world that existed before consciousness as we know it?

Beyond the Hard Problem: VI. Primary Consciousness

In the previous post, we followed a possibility that leads away from the hard problem.

Before meaning, there may be mattering.

Before signs, there may be biological value.

Before language, there may be forms of consciousness.

This last possibility is central to Gerald Edelman's distinction between primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness.

It also changes the question we have been asking.

If consciousness does not begin with language, then the adult human experience of being conscious cannot be taken as the model from which consciousness in general is defined.

Human consciousness may be one particular form of a much older phenomenon.

Consciousness before language

Edelman's primary consciousness belongs to organisms capable of integrating perceptual and behavioural information in the context of their biological value systems.

It does not require language.

It does not require the human capacity to formulate thoughts about one's own thoughts.

It does not require the symbolic construction of an autobiographical self.

Animals can perceive, discriminate, remember, anticipate and act without possessing anything resembling human language.

And, for Edelman, many such animals are conscious.

This is a remarkably important move.

It separates consciousness from human higher-order consciousness.

The distinction prevents us from making a very common conceptual error: taking the form of consciousness with which we are most familiar and treating it as though it were the phenomenon itself.

The human temptation

When philosophers ask what consciousness is like, they naturally begin with examples drawn from human experience.

The redness of red.

The taste of coffee.

The pain of an injury.

The sound of music.

The feeling of being oneself.

These examples are powerful because they are immediately available to us.

But they are also peculiar.

They belong to organisms with extraordinarily elaborate nervous systems, bodies, social relations and semiotic resources.

And we access them through those resources.

The redness of red is not simply a piece of raw experience lying on a table waiting to be inspected.

The very act of identifying it as redness is already an achievement of human consciousness and language.

We therefore need to distinguish two questions:

What is consciousness?

and

What is human consciousness capable of becoming?

They may not have the same answer.

A consciousness without concepts

Imagine an animal that sees a predator.

It does not need the proposition there is a predator approaching.

It does not need a word for predator.

It does not need a concept of death.

Yet the animal's world is not thereby empty of significance.

The predator matters.

The animal's perceptual and bodily organisation changes accordingly.

Attention shifts.

Movement changes.

Physiology changes.

Action becomes urgent.

If the animal is conscious, then its consciousness does not consist in contemplating a proposition about what it sees.

It consists, at least in part, in being differently situated within a world that matters.

This gives us a very different way of thinking about experience.

Instead of beginning with a detached subject contemplating qualia, we begin with an organism oriented within a field of biological significance.

The experience is not first an internal object and then connected to the world.

The organism is already in a relation with the world.

The body matters

This also makes the body impossible to ignore.

Primary consciousness is not simply consciousness occurring inside a brain.

The brain belongs to an organism.

The organism has a body.

The body regulates temperature, energy, movement and internal conditions.

It receives signals from the environment and from itself.

It acts upon the environment and is changed by its actions.

The distinction between inside and outside therefore becomes more complicated than the hard problem sometimes suggests.

The conscious organism is not an isolated observer receiving representations of an external world.

It is a living system continuously engaged with that world.

This is one reason Edelman's emphasis on biological value is so important.

The nervous system is embedded in a body whose survival depends upon selective relations with its environment.

Consciousness, if it emerges within such a system, emerges within a system for which things already matter.

A world before language

Primary consciousness also allows us to rethink what we mean by a world.

A world need not be a collection of objects represented in propositions.

For an animal, the world may be structured by opportunities and threats, food and shelter, territory and movement, conspecifics and predators, warmth and cold.

These are not necessarily meanings in the human semiotic sense.

They are possibilities for action within a field of biological significance.

The animal does not have to represent its world symbolically in order to inhabit it.

This is perhaps where the notion of mattering becomes especially useful.

A world can be significant without yet being meaningful.

And consciousness can therefore exist without the semiotic systems through which humans make experience explicit.

But primary consciousness is not uniform

There is an important qualification.

If consciousness can exist without language, it does not follow that all primary consciousness is the same.

A bat, a dog, an octopus and a human infant do not inhabit identical worlds.

Their bodies differ.

Their sensory capacities differ.

Their modes of action differ.

Their ecological relations differ.

Their social organisation differs.

Their nervous systems differ.

Their biological value systems differ.

So even if we use the same term—consciousness—we should not assume that there is a single experiential content shared unchanged across species.

There may be many forms of primary consciousness.

The important question is therefore not simply:

Do animals have consciousness?

It is:

What form can consciousness take in an organism with this body, this nervous system, this ecology and this history?

That is a much more evolutionary question.

The social dimension

And it brings us to an important complication.

An organism is not necessarily alone.

Many animals live in highly structured social environments. They coordinate behaviour, recognise individuals, compete, cooperate, care for offspring, establish relationships and respond to complex patterns of social interaction.

Some species possess elaborate systems of signalling.

Those systems need not be languages in the human sense.

But they can nonetheless alter what is possible for an organism.

A creature living in a rich social environment does not merely have more information to process.

Its world is socially structured.

Other organisms become significant in increasingly differentiated ways.

A call can signal danger.

A movement can coordinate action.

A display can alter another animal's behaviour.

A social interaction can change what happens next.

This suggests that primary consciousness may itself be shaped by the social organisation in which an organism lives.

Not because language is required for consciousness.

But because the world that consciousness differentiates is partly constituted by the organism's relations with others.

From primary to higher-order consciousness

Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness therefore gives us a developmental possibility.

Primary consciousness can exist without language.

Higher-order consciousness, in Edelman's account, involves capacities associated with language and symbolic representation, including the ability to construct a more elaborate model of self and time.

The distinction is not simply between animals and humans.

It is between different forms of organisation of consciousness.

This matters enormously for the hard problem.

The human ability to ask What is it like to be me? may be a very late development.

The capacity to have an experience need not contain the capacity to reflect upon that experience.

The capacity to feel pain need not contain the concept pain.

The capacity to perceive colour need not contain the word red.

The capacity to experience a world need not contain a theory of consciousness.

This suggests that the phenomenon philosophers call consciousness may have a much longer natural history than the human ability to conceptualise it.

The evolutionary question

We can now return to the possibility space opened in the previous posts.

If primary consciousness exists before language, then the evolution of consciousness cannot be reduced to the evolution of human symbolic thought.

We need to ask what happened earlier.

What kinds of nervous organisation became possible?

What kinds of biological value systems developed?

What forms of perceptual integration emerged?

What kinds of organisms benefited from increasingly differentiated ways of responding to their environments?

And, crucially:

At what point did a world that mattered become a world experienced?

We should not expect a single answer.

Evolution does not necessarily proceed by crossing one sharp boundary at a time.

Different organisms may occupy different regions of the possibility space.

Different forms of consciousness may have evolved under different ecological and social conditions.

There may be no single thing called the conscious experience.

There may instead be a family of forms of consciousness produced by different histories of organismic organisation.

The semiotic possibility

This leaves language in an interesting position.

Language is not the beginning of consciousness.

But neither is it irrelevant to consciousness.

Once an organism participates in a sufficiently elaborate social semiotic system, the possibilities of consciousness can change.

Experience can become something that can be shared.

An internal state can become something that can be indicated to another.

A social interaction can become an object of reflection.

A distinction that once operated only within immediate experience can become available for symbolic construal.

And eventually, with human language, consciousness can begin to operate upon its own prior constructions.

This is where primary consciousness can become higher-order consciousness.

The transition is not from no consciousness to consciousness.

It is from one organisation of consciousness to another.

That distinction may be decisive.

Beyond the human starting point

The hard problem often begins with a human subject who is already conscious, already reflective and already capable of asking philosophical questions.

Edelman's primary consciousness gives us a different starting point.

We begin with organisms.

They have bodies.

They have biological value.

They inhabit environments.

They discriminate.

They act.

Some are conscious.

Others may not be.

But if consciousness is present, it is present within an evolutionary and organismic history.

This makes the question less like:

Why does this physical system have experience?

and more like:

What kinds of living organisation make experience possible?

That question does not eliminate the mystery.

It gives the mystery a history.

And once consciousness has a history, another question becomes unavoidable.

If primary consciousness can exist without language, what happens when consciousness develops within increasingly complex social relations and systems of communication?

Perhaps language does not create consciousness.

Perhaps it reorganises what consciousness can become.

That is where we need to look next.

Beyond the Hard Problem: V. When Things Matter

In the previous post, we suggested that the philosophical zombie leaves something important out.

Not necessarily consciousness.

The organism.

An organism is not simply a physical system with functions. It is a living organisation whose continued existence depends upon its relations with its environment. Some differences in that environment matter to it; others do not.

This gives us a place to begin that is earlier than meaning.

Before something can mean something, perhaps something has to matter.

A world that makes a difference

The physical world is full of differences.

There are variations in temperature, pressure, light, chemical concentration, movement and countless other properties.

But not every physical difference makes a difference to every system.

A particular wavelength may be irrelevant to a rock.

For a photosynthetic organism, it may be consequential.

A change in temperature may be negligible for one system and fatal for another.

A chemical gradient may be merely a distribution of molecules from one perspective and a path towards nourishment from another.

The difference is not simply in the physical event.

It lies in the relation between the event and the organisation of the organism.

This is what biological value makes visible.

Something matters when a difference becomes significant for the continuation and organisation of a living system.

The significance is not yet symbolic.

Nothing needs to stand for anything else.

The organism does not need a concept of nourishment for nourishment to matter.

It does not need the sign danger for danger to matter.

Mattering can precede representation.

And that may be one of the most important facts about consciousness that we tend to overlook.

Edelman's value systems

Gerald Edelman's account of consciousness begins from this biological ground.

His value systems are not simply information channels. They are rooted in the organism's biological needs and in the selective processes that shape its nervous system.

The nervous system develops in an organism for which some states are better than others.

The organism must maintain itself.

It must respond selectively.

It must distinguish.

And the consequences of those distinctions feed back into the organisation of the system.

This gives neural activity a context that is absent from the abstract notion of information processing.

Information can be described without saying why any particular difference matters.

Biological value cannot.

A value system is already a relation between difference and significance.

The nervous system is not simply processing a world.

It is participating in the maintenance of an organism for which the world has consequences.

This does not yet give us phenomenal consciousness.

But it gives us something that the standard hard-problem formulation can make strangely difficult to see:

a natural history of significance.

Mattering before meaning

This is where our distinction between mattering and meaning becomes useful.

Meaning is a semiotic achievement.

Mattering is not.

A social group can establish that a sound means danger.

But an animal can be endangered long before anything means danger.

A human being can understand that a particular sound signifies rain.

But a plant does not need the concept of rain for water to matter to it.

Meaning involves a system of signs and values within which something can be construed as something else.

Mattering is more primitive.

It concerns the way an organism is organised so that differences in its environment have consequences for it.

This gives us a possible trajectory:

difference → mattering → meaning

Not as a rigid evolutionary ladder, and certainly not as a claim that one automatically produces the next.

Rather, as a sequence of increasing possibilities.

Once something matters, there is a basis for selective responsiveness.

Once organisms become capable of increasingly complex selective responsiveness, new forms of coordination become possible.

Once organisms coordinate socially, signals can acquire increasingly differentiated significance.

And when those signals become part of a semiotic system, meaning becomes possible.

The important point is that meaning does not have to appear from nowhere.

It can develop within a world that already matters.

Could this be relevant to consciousness?

Here we approach the hard problem from a different direction.

Chalmers asks why physical and functional organisation should be accompanied by phenomenal experience.

But perhaps the question assumes that physical organisation is the whole starting point.

What if the relevant starting point is biological organisation?

Then the question changes.

We are no longer asking why an otherwise complete physical system has experience.

We are asking how a living system, whose very organisation depends upon distinctions that matter to it, can develop increasingly differentiated ways of relating to those distinctions.

This is not yet an explanation of qualia.

Nor should we pretend that it is.

But it changes the explanatory landscape.

Consider pain.

A purely physical description can specify nociceptive activity, neural pathways and behavioural responses.

But the biological significance of injury is not an additional fact pasted onto those processes.

The organism is organised in such a way that tissue damage threatens its integrity, triggers protective responses and alters subsequent behaviour.

Pain, if we are eventually to understand it, belongs somewhere within that history of significance.

The hard problem asks why all this should feel like anything.

That question remains.

But perhaps we have been asking it too early.

Perhaps before asking why significance is experienced, we need to understand how a world of significance arises for a living system in the first place.

The temptation to collapse the distinction

There is an obvious danger here.

Once mattering begins to look promising, we might simply declare:

Mattering is consciousness.

Problem solved.

But that would repeat the very mistake this series is trying to avoid.

We would have replaced one unexplained identity with another.

Biological value is not the same thing as phenomenal experience.

A bacterium's response to a chemical gradient does not obviously entail anything like the experience of tasting sugar.

Nor does every form of biological regulation imply consciousness.

The distinction between mattering and meaning must therefore remain.

And so must the distinction between mattering and consciousness.

The point is not to collapse the categories.

It is to understand their relations.

Perhaps mattering is a necessary condition for some forms of consciousness.

Perhaps it is one ingredient among many.

Perhaps it marks a transition in organisation that becomes important only with nervous systems of sufficient complexity.

Perhaps consciousness can exist in forms in which biological value is radically different from our own.

These remain open questions.

And keeping them open is precisely the point.

The possibility of a natural history

What mattering gives us is a way of asking for a natural history.

Instead of beginning with the fully formed human subject and asking how subjective experience relates to physical description, we can move backwards.

What makes an organism possible?

What makes self-maintaining organisation possible?

What makes biological value possible?

What makes increasingly sophisticated discrimination possible?

What makes nervous systems possible?

What makes primary consciousness possible?

What changes when organisms live together?

What changes when social signals become organised?

What changes when experience can be construed through language?

Each question opens another region of the possibility space.

None requires us to assume that the final answer must be uniquely human.

Indeed, the opposite may be more productive.

If consciousness is a natural phenomenon, we should expect it to have a natural history.

And a natural history does not begin with the human capacity to ask philosophical questions about qualia.

It begins much earlier.

Significance without signs

There is another consequence.

If mattering precedes meaning, then significance does not begin with signs.

This matters because consciousness is often approached through human examples: the redness of red, the taste of coffee, the experience of pain, the sound of music.

These are legitimate examples.

But they are extraordinarily late examples.

They belong to organisms with elaborate nervous systems, complex social relations and, in our case, highly developed semiotic systems.

They may therefore tell us something about human forms of consciousness without telling us what consciousness must be in general.

Perhaps the human experience of redness is not the primitive phenomenon.

Perhaps it is the outcome of a very long history in which organisms first became sensitive to differences that mattered, then developed increasingly complex forms of discrimination and interaction, and eventually developed symbolic systems capable of construing experience itself.

If so, qualia may not be the beginning of the story.

They may be very far from it.

From value to experience

This leaves us with a question that is more modest than the hard problem but, perhaps, more fertile.

What happens when biological mattering becomes sufficiently differentiated that there is something it is like for the organism to be differently situated within its world?

We do not know the answer.

And we suspect we should resist pretending that we do.

But the question has one advantage.

It does not begin by assuming that consciousness is an inexplicable addition to an otherwise complete description of reality.

It begins with a living system.

A system for which things already matter.

A system whose organisation has been shaped by the consequences of those differences.

A system whose nervous system develops within that history of value.

Perhaps consciousness emerges from this history.

Perhaps it accompanies it.

Perhaps it is more fundamental than that.

But whatever the answer, we now have a question about how consciousness could belong to nature rather than merely asking how nature could somehow produce consciousness.

That distinction is small in wording.

It is enormous in possibility.

And it brings us to the next question.

If mattering does not require language, representation or human self-awareness, then consciousness need not begin with any of them either.

Perhaps there was consciousness long before there was anyone capable of asking what consciousness was.

Perhaps there is still consciousness wherever we have been looking only for its human form.

The next step, then, is to leave the human subject behind.

And ask what Edelman meant by primary consciousness.

Beyond the Hard Problem: IV. The Missing Organism

In the previous post, we suggested that the philosophical zombie performs an operation.

It begins with an organism, abstracts its physical and functional organisation, freezes that organisation as a complete description, and then asks whether consciousness can be subtracted without changing anything else.

The result is a curious creature.

It has the body of an organism.

It has the brain of an organism.

It behaves like an organism.

But perhaps the most important thing about it is what it no longer has:

the organismic relation to a world.

The zombie may therefore be missing something more fundamental than consciousness.

It may be missing the organism itself.

An organism is not a machine with a user

We often speak as though an organism were a particularly complicated machine.

This is useful up to a point.

Brains process signals. Muscles contract. Cells exchange chemicals. Neural networks discriminate patterns. Organisms perform functions.

But there is something different about an organism.

A machine can perform a function for the purposes for which it was designed.

An organism performs functions in relation to its own continued existence.

Its organisation is not indifferent to what happens.

A bacterium moves towards some chemical conditions and away from others.

A plant grows towards light.

An animal searches for food, avoids danger, regulates its temperature and responds to changes in its surroundings.

The point is not that these organisms possess human-like intentions.

They do not need to.

The point is that differences in their environment have biological significance.

Some conditions support the continuation of their organisation.

Others threaten it.

The organism therefore does not merely occupy an environment.

It exists in a world of differences that matter to it.

From information to value

This is where Gerald Edelman's work becomes particularly important.

Edelman placed biological value at the centre of his account of nervous-system development and consciousness.

The nervous system is not simply an information-processing device receiving a neutral stream of data from the outside world.

Its organisation is shaped by the needs of the organism.

Some outcomes are biologically advantageous.

Others are not.

Selection operates within this field of biological value.

This gives us a concept that is easily overlooked when consciousness is approached primarily as a problem about subjective experience:

mattering precedes meaning.

Something can matter to an organism without meaning anything in a human symbolic sense.

A change in temperature can matter to an animal without being represented by the proposition the temperature has changed.

Food can matter without the animal possessing the concept food.

Danger can matter without there being a linguistic sign for danger.

Biological value does not require symbolic meaning.

But it does establish a world that is not simply physically different.

It is significantly different for the organism.

That distinction may prove crucial.

The world is not a catalogue of properties

Consider the difference between two descriptions.

In one description, there are changes in temperature, concentrations of chemicals, variations in light, movements through space, electrical signals and patterns of neural activity.

In another, there is warmth, hunger, attraction, avoidance, opportunity, threat and satisfaction.

The second description is not simply a poetic translation of the first.

It concerns relations between an organism and its environment.

The organism's world is constituted by what its organisation makes significant.

This does not mean that the organism invents the world.

The external conditions are real.

But their significance is relational.

A temperature is not for a rock in the same way that it is for an organism whose survival depends upon maintaining a particular range of internal conditions.

The difference lies neither wholly in the environment nor wholly inside the organism.

It lies in the relation.

This is precisely the kind of relation that disappears when we turn the organism into an abstract physical description.

The temperature of life

Edelman's emphasis on biological regulation points towards something even more interesting.

Living systems maintain themselves within conditions that are extraordinarily unlike the conditions of the surrounding environment.

Their organisation actively preserves the conditions under which their organisation can continue.

This is especially striking in animals whose internal conditions are tightly regulated.

Endothermy, for example, creates a distinctive kind of organism–environment relation. The organism does not simply undergo environmental temperature; it actively maintains its own internal thermal conditions.

A regulated body is therefore not merely a passive physical system.

It is a system for which departures from particular conditions have consequences.

The world acquires a topology of significance.

Some differences matter greatly.

Some barely matter.

Some are beneficial.

Some are dangerous.

Some are irrelevant.

Long before a creature can say this matters, something can already matter to the creature.

That is a very different starting point for thinking about consciousness.

Mattering is not yet meaning

We should be careful here.

It would be tempting to say that biological value simply is consciousness.

That would move too quickly.

A bacterium can be responsive to gradients without possessing anything resembling human subjective awareness. An organism can discriminate biological significance without possessing language or reflective self-consciousness.

Nor should we simply equate mattering with meaning.

Meaning belongs to a semiotic order.

Mattering is more basic.

It belongs to the organisation of a living system whose continued existence depends upon how it relates to its environment.

But that difference may be precisely what makes the distinction useful.

If meaning develops from forms of organisation in which things already matter, then consciousness does not have to be imagined as appearing in an otherwise meaningless physical universe.

There is already a history.

There is already value.

There is already a world structured by significance.

The missing history

The organism therefore gives us something the zombie cannot easily provide.

History.

The organism has evolved.

It has developed.

Its nervous system has been shaped through selection.

Its body regulates itself.

Its capacities have emerged in relation to an environment.

Its behaviour changes the environment, which changes the conditions to which it must respond.

The organism and its world are not two independently completed entities subsequently connected by causal links.

They develop together.

This is not to say that organism and environment are indistinguishable.

It is to say that the relations between them are part of what an organism is.

And this changes the consciousness question.

Instead of asking:

How can consciousness be added to a physical organism?

we can ask:

What kinds of organism–environment relations make increasingly differentiated forms of consciousness possible?

That question has no obvious answer.

But unlike the hard problem, it gives evolution somewhere to begin.

Before there is meaning

The importance of biological value is that it occupies a conceptual territory between physics and meaning.

There is physical difference.

There is biological significance.

There is eventually social organisation.

There is eventually semiotic meaning.

These are not necessarily separate substances or discrete stages.

They are different forms of organisation in which earlier relations are retained and reorganised.

A living system does not cease to be physical when it becomes biological.

A social system does not cease to be biological.

A semiotic system does not float free of the organismic and social conditions that sustain it.

The later does not replace the earlier.

It transforms what the earlier can do.

This gives us a rather different way of approaching the problem of consciousness.

Perhaps the question is not how something non-physical gets added to the physical.

Perhaps the question is how significance becomes progressively differentiated through organisation.

From physical difference to biological mattering.

From mattering to increasingly complex discrimination and action.

From individual organisms to social relations.

From social relations to semiotic organisation.

And eventually, perhaps, to forms of consciousness capable of construing their own experience.

That is not yet a theory.

It is a direction of inquiry.

Restoring the organism

The philosophical zombie asks us to imagine that consciousness can be absent while everything physical and functional remains exactly the same.

The organism asks us to consider whether everything has really remained the same.

What happens to biological value?

What happens to developmental history?

What happens to organism–environment relations?

What happens to the fact that the system is maintaining itself?

What happens to the differences that matter to it?

If these are essential aspects of organismic organisation, then they cannot simply be dismissed as external context.

They are part of the phenomenon we are trying to understand.

Perhaps, then, the zombie thought experiment has not demonstrated that consciousness is an additional property beyond physical organisation.

Perhaps it has demonstrated something subtler:

that an abstraction from an organism can be mistaken for the organism itself.

And once the organism is restored, the question begins to change.

We are no longer asking how an inexplicable experience could somehow appear inside a machine.

We are asking how a living system comes to inhabit a world structured by value, significance and increasingly complex forms of relation.

That takes us to a deceptively simple question.

Before anything can mean something to an organism,

what does it mean for something to matter?