Once we begin thinking in terms of conscious activity rather than consciousness as a possession, biology appears in a rather different light.
The traditional question asks:
Where does consciousness come from?
Our question is slightly different.
How is conscious activity continually organised?
The distinction may seem small.
It changes almost everything.
Living organisms do not merely exist.
They participate.
They continually exchange matter and energy with their surroundings.
They perceive.
They respond.
They maintain themselves despite continual change.
Every moment of life is already an organised achievement.
Conscious activity, if it exists, must therefore belong within this larger organisation rather than standing mysteriously apart from it.
Consider perception.
It is tempting to imagine perception as the passive reception of information from the external world.
Yet living organisms do something far richer.
They continually organise what they encounter.
Patterns are distinguished.
Relationships are established.
Expectations are confirmed or revised.
The organism is not simply receiving a world.
It is participating in one.
Perception is already an active accomplishment.
The same is true of action.
Movement is not merely the consequence of perception.
Perception and action continually organise one another.
Every movement changes what can be perceived.
Every perception reorganises what movements become possible.
The organism participates in an ongoing cycle rather than progressing through a sequence of isolated stages.
Living activity is fundamentally reciprocal.
This reciprocal organisation extends further still.
The organism does not merely categorise its surroundings.
It continually reorganises its own categorisations.
Earlier experiences shape later expectations.
Later experiences reorganise earlier understandings.
Participation acquires a history.
The world is not encountered afresh at every moment.
It is encountered through an organisation continually reshaped by previous participation.
Memory is no longer an addition to consciousness.
It is one of the ways conscious activity remains historically organised.
This observation suggests an important possibility.
Perhaps conscious activity is not simply awareness of the world.
Perhaps it also involves the continual participation of an organism in its own ongoing participation.
The organism not only distinguishes aspects of its surroundings.
It continually reorganises the significance of its own distinctions as new experience unfolds.
Awareness therefore becomes inseparable from organised self-participation.
Notice that nothing supernatural has been introduced.
We have not added an invisible substance.
Nor have we reduced conscious activity to neural mechanisms alone.
Instead, we have described an organised process unfolding across many levels simultaneously.
The nervous system participates.
The body participates.
The environment participates.
The history of previous participation also participates.
Conscious activity belongs to the organisation of these relationships rather than to any single component considered in isolation.
This perspective also explains why consciousness may not be an all-or-nothing phenomenon.
Organised participation admits degrees of richness.
Histories differ.
Memories differ.
Capacities for reorganisation differ.
If conscious activity depends upon these organisations, then different organisms may participate consciously in different ways without requiring an absolute boundary between the conscious and the unconscious.
The question becomes one of organisation rather than possession.
Indeed, biological life already provides many examples of such variation.
Periods of sleep and wakefulness differ profoundly.
Anaesthesia temporarily disrupts organised participation.
Development gradually enriches it.
Illness may diminish it.
Recovery may restore it.
Some animals display remarkably flexible participation in their environments.
Others appear more locally organised around immediate circumstances.
The biological world already suggests that conscious activity may be dynamic rather than uniform.
This possibility has an important consequence.
If conscious activity is an organised achievement, it may also be locally organised.
There need not be a single, uninterrupted stream of consciousness flowing identically through every circumstance.
Different forms of participation may become available under different conditions.
The richness of conscious activity may itself fluctuate as organisation changes.
Conscious activity, like every organised process we have examined, may possess its own history of continual reorganisation.
This way of thinking also invites renewed attention to the brain.
The brain is not a theatre within which consciousness is displayed.
Nor is it a container in which consciousness resides.
It is one participant within an extraordinarily rich organisation.
Its remarkable importance lies not in housing consciousness, but in continually coordinating countless participations across perception, memory, anticipation, movement and evaluation.
Its achievement is organisational.
None of this tells us precisely which organisms participate consciously.
Nor does it settle every disagreement about animal consciousness.
It does, however, change the nature of those disagreements.
Instead of searching for an invisible property, we investigate patterns of organised participation.
Instead of asking whether consciousness suddenly appears, we ask how histories of participation become increasingly capable of sustaining conscious activity.
The emphasis shifts from classification to understanding.
This shift prepares us for the next stage of our journey.
For if biological conscious activity is understood as an organised history of participation rather than as a mysterious possession, an unavoidable question follows.
Could other forms of organised participation develop different forms of conscious activity?
That question no longer appears impossible.
Nor does it appear inevitable.
It simply becomes a question that can now be asked with greater clarity.
And that, perhaps, is the beginning of genuine understanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment