In the previous post, we suggested that before trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness, we should ask how it became the problem.
This is not merely a question about terminology.
How we formulate a problem affects what can count as a solution.
A problem does not simply occupy a space of possibilities that was already there. Its formulation can alter that space.
This is what we mean by controlling the possibility space.
The problem determines the possible answers
Suppose we ask:
How does the brain produce consciousness?
The question already contains a considerable amount of theory.
It assumes that there is a brain, that there is consciousness, that these can be distinguished, and that the relevant relationship is one in which the former somehow produces the latter.
We may then propose increasingly sophisticated answers: emergence, information integration, global broadcasting, higher-order representation, quantum processes, fundamental phenomenal properties, and so forth.
But notice what remains constant.
The brain is on one side.
Consciousness is on the other.
The problem is how to get from here to there.
The question may therefore generate an impressive diversity of answers while preserving the same underlying possibility space.
We can vary the proposed bridge without questioning the river.
This is one of the peculiar powers of a conceptual distinction. It can make a problem more tractable while simultaneously making some alternatives almost invisible.
Distinctions are productive
This does not mean that distinctions are bad.
Quite the opposite.
Without distinctions, inquiry would scarcely be possible. We need to distinguish organism from environment, perception from action, structure from function, individual from collective, physical from biological, and so on.
The important question is not whether a distinction is true.
It is what the distinction makes possible.
And what it makes difficult to see.
A distinction is an instrument of inquiry. But like any instrument, it has affordances and limitations.
A microscope reveals structures invisible to the naked eye while making other aspects of the specimen irrelevant to what we see. A map makes some relations explicit while suppressing others.
Conceptual distinctions work in much the same way.
The danger comes when the result of an abstraction is mistaken for an independently existing thing.
We separate two aspects of a phenomenon for purposes of inquiry, and then begin to ask how the two things interact.
At that point the abstraction has quietly become an ontology.
The hard problem as a possibility-space controller
This is where the hard problem becomes especially interesting.
Chalmers's distinction between the “easy” problems and the hard problem directs our attention towards the apparent gap between functional explanation and subjective experience.
There is considerable value in doing this. It prevents us from assuming that an explanation of what a system does has automatically explained what experience is like.
But the distinction can also have a second effect.
It can encourage us to treat functional organisation and experience as though they were independently specifiable domains whose relationship subsequently requires explanation.
Once that separation is in place, the central question becomes almost unavoidable:
Why should this functional organisation be accompanied by experience?
And once that is the question, an enormous amount of inquiry can be organised around closing the gap.
But perhaps the gap is partly an artefact of the way the phenomenon has been abstracted.
Perhaps the organism was never merely a functional system to which experience was added.
Perhaps experience is not something that accompanies organisation from outside, but something that develops with particular forms of organismic organisation.
Perhaps the distinction between function and experience is real at one level of description while misleading if treated as an ultimate division in nature.
The point is not that this must be so.
The point is that it remains a possibility only if we refuse to let the original distinction close the possibility space.
A distinction can be illuminating without being fundamental
This gives us a useful principle:
A conceptual distinction can be illuminating without being ontologically fundamental.
The distinction between physical and biological is illuminating.
But life is not a second substance added to matter.
The distinction between organism and environment is illuminating.
But organisms do not exist independently of the environments in which their organisation has significance.
The distinction between individual and collective is illuminating.
But many biological and social phenomena cannot be understood adequately from either side alone.
Likewise, perhaps the distinction between physical process and phenomenal experience is illuminating without requiring us to treat the two as independent kinds of thing.
This possibility becomes particularly important when we introduce development.
A distinction made about a mature organism may not describe the process through which that organism came to have its mature capacities.
And that process may matter.
The frozen moment
There is another way in which the possibility space can be controlled.
We can freeze time.
Take an adult human being and ask what would happen if everything physical and functional remained exactly the same, but consciousness were absent.
The thought experiment appears to give us a clean comparison.
But the cleanliness is purchased by removing history.
The organism is presented as though its current organisation were simply there.
Its development disappears.
Its evolutionary history disappears.
Its relations with other organisms disappear.
Its biological value systems disappear from the description.
Its social and semiotic history disappears.
What remains is an extraordinarily precise snapshot.
And then we ask whether something essential is missing from the snapshot.
Perhaps it is.
But perhaps the thing that has been removed is not merely consciousness.
Perhaps we have removed becoming.
That possibility will become important when we reach the philosophical zombie.
Opening the space again
To reopen a possibility space does not mean accepting every possibility.
That would be no better than closing it prematurely.
It means asking what has been excluded by the way the question was framed.
Instead of asking only:
How does consciousness arise from the physical?
we might ask:
What happens when physical organisation becomes biological organisation?
And then:
What happens when biological organisation comes to matter to the organism itself?
And:
What happens when organisms become socially organised?
And:
What happens when social organisation becomes semiotic?
And finally:
What happens when experience can be construed as meaning?
These questions do not form a ladder with a predetermined destination. Nor do they imply that each level simply causes the next.
They are invitations to look again at relations that a particular abstraction may have hidden.
The task is therefore not to replace one controlling distinction with another.
It is to keep the distinctions open to revision.
Perhaps consciousness really is irreducible.
Perhaps it is fundamental.
Perhaps it emerges from biological organisation in ways we do not yet understand.
Perhaps some form of phenomenal experience is present much more widely than we normally suppose.
Perhaps the categories themselves will eventually need to be reorganised.
We do not yet know.
But we can make one methodological commitment:
Do not let the formulation of the problem decide in advance what kinds of answers are allowed.
That is the beginning of opening the possibility space.
And it leads naturally to the most famous device for testing the hard problem's central distinction.
The philosophical zombie.
But before asking whether a creature physically and functionally identical to us could lack consciousness, we should ask a more awkward question:
What exactly have we done to the organism in order to make the zombie possible?
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