There is an observer at the centre of the hard problem.
It is easy not to notice.
We begin with a distinction between physical processes and subjective experience. We then ask why the physical processes should be accompanied by experience.
But who is asking?
The question is not posed by physics.
It is not posed by a brain considered as an isolated physical object.
It is posed by a conscious organism capable of reflecting upon its own experience, construing that experience through language, comparing descriptions, imagining alternatives and asking whether one level of description can be reduced to another.
The observer is therefore not standing outside the problem.
The observer is part of its history.
And this may matter more than we have realised.
The view from nowhere
Scientific inquiry often works by abstraction.
We isolate variables. We distinguish observer from observed. We describe objects in terms that can, as far as possible, be shared between observers.
This is extraordinarily powerful.
But the success of abstraction can create an illusion.
Once we have produced a description from which the observer has been removed, we may begin to think that the description represents reality as it is independently of any participation in it.
The observer disappears from the picture.
This is often exactly what we want.
But consciousness creates a peculiar difficulty.
The phenomenon being investigated is partly the phenomenon that makes investigation possible.
We are trying to understand experience by means of a form of experience capable of turning itself into an object of inquiry.
The observer cannot simply step outside consciousness in order to inspect it.
There is no external vantage point from which consciousness can be observed in the same way that we might observe a rock.
The observer is already inside the phenomenon.
Who imagines the zombie?
This gives the zombie thought experiment an interesting complication.
We are invited to imagine a physically identical human being who behaves exactly as we do but has no experience.
But who is doing the imagining?
A conscious human being.
And what makes the zombie intelligible as a zombie?
Our capacity to distinguish between behaviour and experience.
The thought experiment therefore begins with a distinction that is itself the product of the very phenomenon under investigation.
This does not make the thought experiment invalid.
Thought experiments can be extraordinarily illuminating.
But it does mean that we should ask what kind of operation the thought experiment performs.
The conscious observer imagines a world in which the observer's own consciousness is absent from another organism while the organism's physical and functional description remains intact.
That is a powerful abstraction.
But it is also a peculiar one.
The observer has retained the capacity to imagine, distinguish and reflect while imagining the removal of those very capacities from the imagined subject.
The zombie is therefore constructed from within a conscious world.
We should not be surprised if the resulting object bears the marks of that construction.
The observer does not create the world
There is an obvious danger here.
Once we say that the observer is involved in the phenomenon, we can easily slide into the claim that consciousness somehow creates reality.
That is not what follows.
The world does not depend upon my observation in order to exist.
Rocks existed before humans.
Evolution occurred before anyone formulated a theory of evolution.
Organisms were already responding to their environments long before anyone called those responses experience.
The observer does not manufacture the world.
What the observer does is participate in a particular mode of access to the world.
That distinction is crucial.
The world is not created by our concepts.
But what becomes available to us as a phenomenon, what distinctions we can make within it, what questions we can ask about it and what counts as an explanation are partly shaped by the conceptual and semiotic resources through which we participate in it.
The observer does not create the possibility space from nothing.
But the observer can control its shape.
And the observer is itself a product of the possibility space it helps to reorganise.
The strange circularity
We can now see a deeper circularity in the hard problem.
We want to explain consciousness.
But the explanatory activity is itself performed by consciousness.
We distinguish objective description from subjective experience.
But the distinction is made by a subject capable of reflecting upon experience.
We describe the brain from the outside.
But the capacity to produce that description developed within organisms whose brains and bodies are themselves part of evolutionary and social histories.
We isolate phenomenal experience as something requiring explanation.
But our ability to isolate it has itself developed through social and semiotic organisation.
The circularity is not necessarily a logical error.
It may instead be a clue.
Perhaps consciousness is one of those phenomena for which the investigator is not merely another object in the field.
Perhaps the observer is one of the things that the history of the phenomenon eventually produces.
From participant to observer
This suggests that the observer should itself have a natural history.
At first there is no observer in the philosophical sense.
There is an organism.
It lives.
It regulates itself.
It discriminates.
It responds.
Things matter to it.
Perhaps, with sufficient neural organisation, there is primary consciousness: a differentiated world experienced from within the organism's own activity.
Then social organisation changes what can matter.
Other organisms become significant.
Signals become coordinated.
Experience becomes increasingly structured through interaction.
Then semiotic systems make experience available for construal.
The organism can remember.
Anticipate.
Compare.
Categorise.
Narrate.
Eventually it can turn its own meanings into objects of thought.
At this point something remarkable happens.
The participant becomes capable of representing itself as an observer.
It can imagine itself looking at the world from outside.
The organism has not actually left the world.
It has acquired a semiotic standpoint from which it can represent itself as if it had.
This may be one of the great achievements of symbolic thought.
And perhaps also one of its great traps.
The external observer is a construction
Science depends upon the ability to construct an external standpoint.
We can describe a tree without mentioning ourselves.
We can describe a brain without mentioning the scientist who is looking at it.
We can describe neural activity in terms that make no reference to experience.
This is not a mistake.
It is a methodological achievement.
But the external standpoint is not literally outside the world.
It is a standpoint constructed within the world.
The scientist is an organism.
The organism has a history.
The history includes evolution.
It includes development.
It includes social interaction.
It includes language.
It includes the conceptual traditions through which scientific objects have been made available for investigation.
The observer can abstract from these conditions.
But abstraction does not abolish them.
This is perhaps the deeper lesson of relational ontology.
A relation can be temporarily bracketed without ceasing to exist.
We can describe an object as though it were independent.
That does not establish its ontological independence.
The observer and the object
The hard problem often appears to involve two things:
the physical object, and
the subjective observer.
But perhaps this is already misleading.
The observer and the object are not two substances that happen to encounter one another.
They are differentiated positions within a much larger relational organisation.
The organism is already related to its environment.
The nervous system is already related to the body.
The body is already related to its environment.
The organism is already related to other organisms.
The developing child is already related to a social world.
The language user is already related to a semiotic system.
The scientist is already related to a community of inquiry.
The observer is therefore not something added to the world from outside.
The observer is what a certain kind of organisation can become within the world.
This changes the question once again.
Instead of asking:
How does an objective physical world produce a subjective observer?
we can ask:
How does a world-organised organism become capable of taking a semiotic standpoint upon itself and its relations?
That is a very different problem.
The observer who discovers consciousness
There is an irony here.
The more sophisticated the observer becomes, the more easily it can forget its own history.
Language allows us to turn experience into an object.
Grammatical metaphor allows us to turn processes into things.
Scientific abstraction allows us to treat relations as if they were properties of independent objects.
Philosophical reflection allows us to ask what consciousness is.
Each achievement creates new possibilities.
But each can also conceal the processes that made the achievement possible.
We can forget that experience is already an abstraction.
We can forget that the brain is an abstraction from an organism.
We can forget that the organism is an abstraction from a network of relations.
We can forget that the observer is an abstraction from a participant.
And then we can find ourselves asking how one abstracted entity could possibly be related to another.
Perhaps the hard problem is, in part, the result of a series of successful abstractions whose conditions have become invisible.
The observer within the phenomenon
There is a more radical consequence.
If the observer is part of the phenomenon's history, then the goal cannot be to discover consciousness from a standpoint completely independent of consciousness.
There is no such standpoint available to us.
This does not make objective investigation impossible.
Quite the contrary.
It tells us what kind of objectivity we should seek.
We should not aim for an impossible view from nowhere.
We should aim for a description that can include the relations by which the observer itself has become possible.
The observer must become part of the account.
Not as a mystical source of reality.
Not as a privileged centre of the universe.
But as an organismic, evolutionary, social and semiotic achievement.
The question then becomes wonderfully recursive.
We are conscious organisms trying to understand how conscious organisms became possible.
We are semiotic beings using meaning to investigate how meaning became possible.
We are observers investigating the history through which observers emerged.
The phenomenon has begun to investigate itself.
The hard problem turns back upon itself
Perhaps this is why the hard problem has proved so resistant.
It is not simply a difficult problem about consciousness.
It is a problem in which consciousness has become capable of making itself strange to itself.
The organism asks why it has experience.
The answer cannot simply come from outside the history of organisms, because the question itself emerged from that history.
The human being asks how consciousness relates to the physical world.
But the human being is already a physical, biological, social and semiotic process through which the distinction between physical and phenomenal has become available.
The observer asks whether experience can be reduced to physical description.
But the observer is itself the product of a history in which physical organisation became biological mattering, biological mattering became increasingly differentiated consciousness, and consciousness became social and semiotic reflection.
The distinction is real.
But perhaps its ontological finality is not.
A different kind of objectivity
What would it mean to take this seriously?
It would not mean abandoning science.
It would mean extending our conception of explanation.
We would ask not only what a phenomenon is made of, but how the organisation of relations makes particular forms of phenomenon possible.
We would not replace physics with phenomenology, or biology with semiotics.
We would look at how these levels participate in one another.
A physical description can be accurate without exhausting the phenomenon.
A biological description can be accurate without exhausting it.
A semiotic description can be accurate without exhausting it.
The task is not to find the one true level.
It is to understand the relations through which different levels become possible.
And perhaps this is exactly what the observer has been hiding from us.
The observer is not the enemy of objectivity.
The observer is part of what a sufficiently rich objectivity must be capable of describing.
Beyond the observer
We have now travelled a considerable distance from the original formulation of the hard problem.
We began with consciousness as a mysterious addition to the physical.
We have followed a possible history:
from physical organisation,
to biological organisation,
to mattering,
to differentiated consciousness,
to social organisation,
to meaning,
to reflective consciousness,
and finally to the observer capable of asking what consciousness is.
At each stage, the later form does not simply replace the earlier one.
It reorganises what was already there.
The observer is still an organism.
The organism is still biological.
The biological is still physical.
But none of these descriptions alone exhausts what the organism has become capable of doing.
Perhaps consciousness is not a thing added to matter.
Perhaps it is a history of organisation in which matter becomes capable of increasingly differentiated relations with itself and its world.
And perhaps the final twist is that one of the things that history eventually produces is an observer who can mistake its own abstraction for a standpoint outside the history.
The observer is within.
It always was.
The question is what becomes possible once the observer can recognise that.
That brings us to the final question of this series.
If the hard problem was produced by a particular way of distinguishing physical process from phenomenal experience, and if that distinction becomes less absolute once we restore organism, history, mattering, sociality, meaning and participation, then what remains of the problem?
We should not expect a final answer in the form of a replacement doctrine.
Perhaps what we need instead is a different way of asking.
Not:
How does consciousness get into the world?
But:
What kinds of organisation allow the world to become experienced, meaningful and reflectively intelligible from within itself?
The hard problem may not disappear.
But perhaps we can finally stop treating it as the beginning.
And begin instead with the history that made the question possible.
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