We have now moved a considerable distance from the hard problem.
We began with the distinction between physical function and phenomenal experience.
We then questioned the philosophical zombie, restored the organism, introduced biological value, and considered Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness.
We have seen that consciousness need not begin with language.
We have also seen that social and semiotic organisation can transform what consciousness can become.
The next question is therefore unavoidable.
How did any of this become possible in the first place?
If consciousness is a natural phenomenon, it must belong to some natural history.
And that history begins long before human beings could ask what consciousness was.
Evolution begins before the question
The hard problem tends to present us with a completed contrast.
On one side is the physical world.
On the other is conscious experience.
The question is how one could possibly give rise to the other.
But evolution does not begin with either side of that contrast.
It begins with processes that precede the distinction.
There is a physical world.
Then there are living systems.
Those living systems maintain themselves.
They interact with their environments.
Some differences matter to them.
They evolve.
Their interactions become increasingly complex.
Some develop nervous systems.
Some become social.
Some develop elaborate systems of communication.
Some eventually develop language.
And some become capable of asking philosophical questions about consciousness.
The human capacity to formulate the hard problem is therefore not the starting point of the story.
It is one of its very late consequences.
From physical to biological
Halliday's broad taxonomy of complex systems offers a useful way of representing this change:
physical → biological → social → semiotic
It should not be read as a simple ladder in which one level disappears when the next appears.
A biological system remains physical.
A social system remains biological and physical.
A semiotic system remains social, biological and physical.
What changes is the organisation of the relations.
Later forms include and reorganise earlier ones.
This gives us a useful alternative to the idea that consciousness must somehow be added to matter.
Perhaps the more interesting question is what becomes possible when physical organisation becomes biological organisation, and what becomes possible again when biological organisation becomes social and semiotic.
The mystery is not simply the appearance of something from nothing.
It is the transformation of possibilities.
Evolution does not select descriptions
There is another reason this matters.
Natural selection does not select abstract physical descriptions.
It selects organisms in environments.
An organism survives or fails according to what happens to the organism.
Food matters.
Temperature matters.
Predators matter.
Reproduction matters.
Social relationships matter.
The organism is therefore already situated within a field of biological significance before anything like human meaning exists.
This gives evolution a direction that is invisible in a purely physical description.
Physical events occur.
But biological systems are organised around the consequences of those events.
The difference between a harmless change and a fatal one is not a difference in the laws of physics.
It is a difference in what the event means for the organism's continued organisation—or, before meaning in the semiotic sense, in what it matters as.
From mattering to consciousness
At some point in evolutionary history, nervous systems became possible.
They allowed organisms to integrate increasingly complex patterns of sensory and motor activity.
They could discriminate.
They could learn.
They could remember.
They could anticipate.
They could coordinate action.
According to Edelman's framework, some organisms eventually possessed primary consciousness.
Exactly how this transition occurred remains an open scientific and philosophical question.
And it should remain open.
The important point for our present argument is methodological.
We do not need to imagine consciousness suddenly appearing in an otherwise complete physical system.
We can ask instead what new possibilities became available as biological organisation became increasingly capable of integrating the organism's relations with its environment.
Perhaps consciousness emerged.
Perhaps some form of consciousness is more deeply woven into nature.
Perhaps the distinction between emergence and fundamentality will itself need revision.
But all these possibilities now belong to an evolutionary space.
What did evolution actually change?
This question is surprisingly difficult.
We are accustomed to describing evolution in terms of new structures and functions.
But perhaps another description is needed.
Evolution changes what an organism can discriminate.
It changes what it can respond to.
It changes what matters.
It changes what it can learn.
It changes what it can remember.
It changes what it can anticipate.
It changes how it can coordinate with others.
It changes the kinds of world an organism can inhabit.
A bat does not merely possess a different sensory apparatus from a human.
It inhabits a different field of possible distinctions.
An octopus does not simply have more or fewer capacities than a dog.
Its body, nervous system and ecological relations make different forms of organisation possible.
Consciousness, if it is related to such capacities, should therefore not be imagined as a single substance distributed across different organisms.
It may be better understood as a family of possibilities realised differently through different evolutionary histories.
The evolutionary significance of embodiment
This is where the body becomes important again.
Evolution does not produce brains in isolation.
It produces organisms.
Bodies and nervous systems evolve together.
Sensory systems develop in relation to the ways organisms move and act.
Motor capacities alter what can be perceived.
Ecological niches alter what distinctions matter.
The organism changes its environment, which changes the conditions under which subsequent evolution occurs.
There is therefore no obvious point at which we can isolate a brain from the organism and declare:
Here is the physical system.
Now explain the experience.
The evolutionary unit is relational.
The organism exists in an environment.
Its nervous system is part of its body.
Its body is part of its mode of life.
And its mode of life is part of its evolutionary history.
The phenomenon we call consciousness belongs somewhere within that entire history.
Evolution into consciousness
This suggests a subtle change in wording.
Instead of asking:
How did consciousness evolve?
we might ask:
How did organisms evolve into forms for which consciousness became possible?
The difference is important.
The first formulation makes consciousness sound like a trait waiting to appear.
The second directs attention towards the transformations that made the trait—or whatever consciousness turns out to be—possible.
What changed in the organisation of life?
What new relations became available?
What forms of biological value emerged?
What kinds of neural integration became possible?
What ecological and social conditions favoured them?
What kinds of primary consciousness followed?
The question becomes developmental in an evolutionary sense.
We are interested not only in the appearance of a property, but in the changing possibility space of organisms.
No single staircase
There is a danger here too.
Once we see a sequence such as
physical → biological → social → semiotic
we may be tempted to turn it into a universal evolutionary staircase.
That would be a mistake.
Evolution has no obligation to follow our conceptual taxonomy.
Not every lineage becomes highly social.
Not every social organism develops a complex semiotic system.
Not every organism with sophisticated cognition develops anything like human language.
And the relations between biological, social and semiotic organisation are not necessarily linear.
They can interact.
They can constrain one another.
They can open new possibilities.
They can also close possibilities.
The taxonomy is therefore best understood as a map of forms of organisation, not as a timetable of evolutionary progress.
The emergence of the social
Nevertheless, the emergence of social organisation is transformative.
Once organisms live in structured relations with one another, the possibilities of biological significance expand.
Another organism becomes not merely predator or prey but partner, rival, offspring, ally, teacher or object of imitation.
Behaviour becomes socially consequential.
Communication becomes possible.
Learning can become social.
The organism's world becomes increasingly populated by distinctions that depend upon relationships among organisms.
This is a major change in the possibility space.
And it prepares the ground for the next transformation:
the organisation of significance itself.
The emergence of the semiotic
A semiotic system does something more than transmit signals.
It provides resources for construing relations as meanings.
This means that once semiotic organisation develops, an organism can participate in a world where distinctions are not merely biologically significant but can be systematically construed.
The difference is profound.
A signal can alter behaviour.
A sign can enter a system of meaning.
A social organism can respond to what another organism does.
A semiotic organism can construe what another organism does as something.
And once experience can be construed as something, it can become available for further construal.
This creates possibilities that were not present at earlier levels.
The system can begin, in a sense, to operate upon its own constructions.
That will become crucial when we return to human ontogenesis.
The evolutionary problem for the hard problem
We can now turn the hard problem around.
Suppose phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally different from physical organisation.
How does that distinction fit into evolutionary history?
When did the difference become relevant?
How could natural selection act upon organisms whose behaviour was partly determined by a property that could not be captured in physical or functional description?
How does a fundamentally non-physical phenomenon enter a process in which organisms reproduce, vary and are selected?
These are not objections to Chalmers's position.
They are questions his position must accommodate.
Conversely, if consciousness emerges from physical organisation, we need to know what kind of emergence is involved.
And if consciousness is fundamental, we need to understand what that fundamentality means in a universe whose conscious organisms nevertheless have a history.
The evolutionary question therefore does not settle the metaphysics.
It disciplines it.
Whatever consciousness is, it has to be compatible with the fact that organisms with different forms of consciousness arose through evolutionary history.
Perhaps the phenomenon is the trajectory
There is another possibility.
Perhaps we have been asking whether consciousness is a property of an organism when we should be asking about the trajectory through which the organism becomes capable of the forms of consciousness it possesses.
The adult organism is not simply a finished object.
It is the current state of a history.
The human brain is the current state of an evolutionary history and an individual developmental history.
Its capacities are inseparable from the relations through which they arose.
This does not mean that history explains everything.
But it does mean that an explanation which removes history before beginning may be removing part of the phenomenon.
The zombie was frozen.
The organism evolves.
And between those two facts lies a great deal of what the hard problem leaves unexplored.
From phylogenesis to ontogenesis
We have now followed one trajectory:
from physical organisation,
to biological organisation,
to mattering,
to increasingly differentiated nervous systems,
to primary consciousness,
to social organisation,
to semiotic possibility.
But there is another trajectory that now demands attention.
The evolutionary history of consciousness is not merely a history of species.
It is also present in every individual organism.
A human child does not inherit adult consciousness fully formed.
The child develops.
And in human development, something extraordinary happens.
A biological organism enters a social world, develops an early semiotic system, and gradually acquires increasingly powerful resources for construing experience.
Eventually, language becomes capable of construing experience in increasingly abstract ways.
Consciousness itself is transformed.
So perhaps the next question is not merely:
How did evolution produce organisms capable of consciousness?
It is:
How does an individual organism become the kind of conscious being that can think about its own experience?
That is the question of ontogenesis.
And it takes us directly to the child.
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