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.
No comments:
Post a Comment