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?
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