Consciousness seems to present us with a peculiar problem.
We can describe what a brain does. We can investigate neural activity, perception, memory, attention, discrimination, learning and behaviour. We can, at least in principle, explain how information is processed, how stimuli are discriminated, how decisions are made and how behaviour is produced.
But none of this, David Chalmers famously argues, seems to explain what it is like to undergo an experience.
There is something it is like to see red, to hear music, to taste coffee, to feel pain. There is a subjective character to experience that appears not to be captured by an account of what the brain and body do.
This is what Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness.
The distinction is powerful. It separates questions about the functions performed by a conscious system from the question of why those functions should be accompanied by subjective experience at all.
And it has proved remarkably durable.
But there is a question that precedes the question of how consciousness can be explained:
How did this become the problem?
That may sound like a semantic objection. It is not.
A problem is never simply given to us in its final form. To call something the hard problem is already to have made a number of decisions about what counts as the phenomenon, what counts as an explanation, and which differences are fundamental.
The distinction between function and experience may be illuminating. But illumination is not the same thing as ontology.
A conceptual distinction can reveal something important without being a distinction that nature itself makes in precisely the same way.
That possibility matters.
What has been separated?
Consider what happens when we begin with the fully developed human subject.
Here is a human being. The brain is functioning. The organism perceives, discriminates, remembers, acts and speaks. And there is, apparently, something it is like to be that organism.
We can then abstract the physical and functional description from the subjective description.
The first can be investigated scientifically.
The second appears to remain.
The temptation is then to ask how the second can possibly arise from the first.
But notice what has happened.
We have begun with an already organised organism and divided our description of it into two apparently different domains: what the organism does and what experience is like.
The division may be useful.
But perhaps it is not innocent.
The organism did not first exist as a collection of physical processes and subsequently acquire experience as an additional property. Nor did it first possess a fully formed adult consciousness and subsequently acquire language with which to describe it.
Organisms develop.
They have histories.
They regulate themselves, discriminate what matters to them, respond to their environments, learn, interact and change. The capacities of an adult organism are the outcomes of processes that began long before the adult existed.
So perhaps the question should not initially be:
Why is there something it is like to be a functioning physical system?
Perhaps we should ask:
What kinds of organisation make increasingly differentiated forms of experience possible?
That is a rather different question.
It does not dissolve the mystery of consciousness. But it changes the terrain on which the mystery is investigated.
From problem to possibility
This is the concern that will guide this series.
We are not interested in showing that Chalmers is simply wrong. Indeed, his formulation captures something genuinely difficult about consciousness. Nor is the point to replace the hard problem with an equally dogmatic alternative.
The more interesting possibility is methodological.
What if the way we formulate a problem also controls the possibility space in which we look for its solution?
Once consciousness is defined primarily as subjective experience, and subjective experience is contrasted with physical and functional organisation, certain questions become almost inevitable.
How can the physical give rise to the phenomenal?
How can objective description explain subjective experience?
How can function entail feeling?
These are legitimate questions.
But other questions become much less visible.
How does biological value develop?
How does an organism come to inhabit a world in which some differences matter more than others?
How do increasingly complex forms of discrimination and response develop?
How does primary consciousness arise, if it does, in organisms that have no human language?
How does social organisation alter the forms of experience available to an organism?
How does a child develop from an organism without human language into one capable of reflecting upon its own experience?
And how does experience become available to consciousness through the semiotic systems by which it is construed as meaning?
These questions do not necessarily answer the hard problem.
They may, however, change what we mean by consciousness before we try to explain it.
The danger of a very good distinction
There is a peculiar danger in philosophy.
A distinction can be so illuminating that we forget that it is a distinction.
Once it has proved useful, it begins to look as though we have discovered the natural architecture of the phenomenon itself.
The map acquires the appearance of being the territory precisely because it is a very good map.
Chalmers's distinction between the easy problems and the hard problem may be such a map.
Perhaps it identifies a genuine difference.
Perhaps it identifies a difference produced by the particular way we have abstracted the phenomenon.
Or perhaps it does both: it reveals something real while simultaneously making other dimensions of that reality harder to see.
That is the possibility we want to explore.
For the alternative to the hard problem is not necessarily an easy problem.
It may be a different kind of question altogether.
Instead of asking how consciousness can be added to an otherwise complete physical account of the world, we might ask how physical, biological, social and semiotic organisation progressively constitute the conditions under which consciousness can take the forms that it does.
That would move us from consciousness as a property to consciousness as a history.
From an isolated phenomenon to an evolving relation.
From the question of how experience gets into the physical world to the question of how worlds of experience become possible for organisms.
And that, perhaps, is where we should begin.
Not by solving the hard problem.
But by asking whether we have yet asked the right question.
No comments:
Post a Comment