We began with a question.
Why is there something it is like to be conscious?
It seemed simple enough.
There is the physical world: matter, energy, brains, neural processes, behaviour.
And then there is experience: redness, pain, pleasure, sound, thought, the peculiar fact that being an organism is not merely something that happens from the outside but something that, apparently, happens from within.
Why should one be accompanied by the other?
This is the hard problem.
But over the course of this series, we have gradually changed the question.
Not because the original question was foolish.
Not because consciousness is an illusion.
And not because we have discovered a final theory that makes the mystery disappear.
Something more modest—and perhaps more consequential—has happened.
We have asked how the problem itself became possible.
A problem has a history
The phrase hard problem makes consciousness look like a fixed feature of reality waiting to be explained.
But problems have histories too.
A problem becomes possible when particular distinctions, concepts and forms of inquiry make certain questions available.
The distinction between physical function and phenomenal experience is illuminating.
It allows us to notice something genuinely important: a complete account of what a system does may not seem to tell us what it is like to be that system.
But an illuminating distinction need not be an ontologically fundamental one.
That has been one of the guiding principles of this series.
A conceptual distinction can reveal something without dividing reality at its joints.
So the question we have repeatedly asked is not simply:
What is the problem?
It is:
How did this become the problem?
And:
What became possible—and impossible—when we made this distinction?
The zombie and the subtraction
The philosophical zombie gave us the clearest example.
We imagined a being physically and functionally identical to us but without consciousness.
At first, this seemed to establish a profound separation.
If everything physical and functional could remain exactly the same while experience disappeared, then experience must be something over and above the physical.
But the thought experiment performed an operation.
It held fixed a particular description of the human being and subtracted consciousness.
What disappeared in the process?
Not simply experience.
History disappeared.
Development disappeared.
Organismic relations disappeared.
The relation between organism and environment disappeared.
The social world disappeared.
The semiotic history through which human experience becomes available for reflection disappeared.
The zombie was missing more than consciousness.
The zombie was missing becoming.
This does not refute the thought experiment.
It changes what we should infer from it.
Perhaps the fact that one level of description does not logically entail another does not establish that the things described at those levels are ontologically independent.
Perhaps we had mistaken an abstraction for a separation.
The organism returns
Once the organism returns, the problem begins to look different.
A living organism is not merely a physical object with functions.
Its continued existence matters to itself in a way that the physical description alone does not capture.
Some differences in its environment are significant for it.
Food matters.
Temperature matters.
Predators matter.
Injury matters.
Reproduction matters.
The organism is not simply located in an environment.
It is organised in relation to one.
This is where Edelman's notion of biological value becomes important.
Before there is meaning, there can be mattering.
That does not mean that every organism is conscious.
Nor does mattering magically solve consciousness.
It means that biological organisation introduces a form of significance into nature that is difficult to see if we describe organisms only as arrangements of matter.
A natural history of consciousness can therefore begin before consciousness.
Consciousness has a natural history
If consciousness is natural, we should expect it to have a natural history.
There is no reason to imagine that consciousness appeared as a finished phenomenon.
Evolution changes organisms.
It changes what they can discriminate, remember, anticipate, learn and respond to.
It changes their possible relations with their environments.
Different bodies make different forms of sensitivity possible.
Different nervous systems make different forms of integration possible.
Different ecological and social histories make different worlds available to different organisms.
Edelman's distinction between primary and higher-order consciousness becomes important here.
Consciousness does not begin with language.
It does not begin with philosophical reflection.
Primary consciousness can exist without either.
Human reflective consciousness is therefore not the template for consciousness as such.
It is one particular historical achievement.
The question is no longer simply:
Why is there consciousness?
It becomes:
How did organisms become organised in ways for which increasingly differentiated forms of consciousness became possible?
That is a different kind of question.
And it is a question with a history.
From mattering to meaning
The next transformation is social.
Organisms encounter other organisms.
The world becomes populated by others who matter.
Predators, prey, mates, offspring, rivals and companions become significant.
Signals coordinate behaviour.
Patterns of interaction become increasingly structured.
And eventually, in humans, social organisation becomes semiotic organisation.
Language does not merely provide names for a world that was already fully formed.
It provides resources for construing that world.
This is where Halliday becomes especially important.
Language is a social semiotic system.
It does not simply transmit information about experience.
It makes experience available for increasingly elaborate forms of meaning.
A difference that matters can become a difference that means.
And a meaning can enter into relations with other meanings.
This gives us another important distinction:
mattering is not meaning.
But meaning grows out of a world in which things already matter.
The emergence of meaning does not abolish the biological.
It reorganises what the organism can do with what matters to it.
From experience to meaning
This is perhaps the most delicate step.
Experience is not meaning.
Pain is not the word pain.
Red is not the word red.
Music is not the description we give it.
The world does not wait for language before anything can be experienced.
But human experience is not available to human reflection in a completely unconstrued form either.
We learn to distinguish experiences.
We learn to classify them.
We learn to remember and compare them.
We learn to tell others about them.
We learn to ask what they mean.
We learn to ask what it means that they mean something.
Language therefore does not create experience.
It changes what experience can become.
This is one of the reasons grammatical metaphor is so important.
Language can turn processes into things, qualities into entities, relations into objects of thought and whole clauses into participants in larger constructions.
Meaning becomes capable of becoming an object of further meaning.
The system can begin to construe its own construals.
And here reflective consciousness takes another step.
We can experience.
Then we can experience ourselves as experiencing.
Then we can think about that experience.
Then we can think about our thinking about the experience.
The recursion is not an accidental feature of human language.
It is one of the possibilities opened by semiotic organisation.
The observer was never outside
Eventually we encountered the observer.
This was perhaps the final piece of the puzzle.
The hard problem is posed by a conscious organism.
The zombie is imagined by a conscious organism.
The distinction between physical description and phenomenal experience is made by a conscious organism.
The philosophical argument itself is a product of the evolutionary, biological, social and semiotic history we have been tracing.
The observer therefore cannot simply stand outside the phenomenon.
This does not mean that observers create reality.
It does not mean that the universe depends upon human consciousness.
It means something more restrained.
The observer is part of the history of the phenomenon being observed.
The scientist is an organism.
The organism has a history.
That history includes biological organisation, social relations, language, conceptual development and forms of abstraction.
The standpoint from which consciousness becomes a philosophical problem is itself something that consciousness became capable of producing.
The observer is within.
What happens to the hard problem?
So where does this leave us?
Not with a solution in the conventional sense.
And that is important.
We have not derived phenomenal consciousness from physics.
We have not demonstrated that biological mattering is sufficient for consciousness.
We have not shown that language generates experience.
We have not reduced qualia to meanings.
We have not proved that the hard problem is meaningless.
What we have done is change the terrain on which the problem appears.
The original formulation asks how subjective experience can arise from an objective physical description.
Our investigation suggests that this may be only one way of construing the situation.
Another begins with relations.
Physical organisation becomes biological organisation.
Biological organisation introduces mattering.
Mattering becomes increasingly differentiated through nervous systems and organism–environment relations.
Social organisation changes the field of significance.
Semiotic organisation makes significance available as meaning.
Meaning becomes capable of reflexive organisation.
And eventually the organism can become an observer of its own experience.
At no point do we need to insert a mysterious substance.
But at no point do we need to reduce the later organisation to the earlier description either.
The later includes the earlier while transforming what the earlier makes possible.
That is not a ladder.
It is a history of reorganisation.
The phenomenon is the trajectory
Perhaps this is the deepest shift.
We began by treating consciousness as a property.
Something a system either has or does not have.
But perhaps the more interesting object of explanation is the trajectory.
An organism becomes.
Its relations become differentiated.
Its world becomes structured by what matters.
Its nervous system becomes capable of integrating increasingly complex distinctions.
Its social world becomes increasingly organised.
Its meanings become increasingly elaborate.
Its language becomes capable of construing its own meanings.
And eventually it can ask:
Why am I conscious?
The question is therefore not outside the trajectory.
It is one of its products.
The phenomenon is not merely the state at the end.
The phenomenon is the trajectory.
That does not tell us exactly what consciousness is.
But perhaps it tells us something about what an adequate account of consciousness would have to explain.
Not merely the finished state.
The becoming.
Beyond reduction and dualism
This also suggests a way beyond a familiar philosophical opposition.
On one side is reductionism.
Consciousness must ultimately be nothing more than physical processing.
On the other is dualism.
Consciousness must therefore belong to something fundamentally different from the physical world.
Both positions can begin from the same assumption:
that physical description and conscious experience are already two independently specifiable things.
Then they disagree about how to relate them.
But perhaps the deeper question is whether we should begin there at all.
What if the distinction between levels of description is real without being a division into separate substances?
What if a physical account tells us something real about an organism without exhausting its biological organisation?
What if a biological account tells us something real about mattering without exhausting consciousness?
What if a semiotic account tells us something real about meaning without exhausting experience?
The choice need not be between reduction and mysterious addition.
There may be a third possibility:
reorganisation.
The question after the question
Perhaps, then, we should stop asking consciousness to appear all at once.
We should ask what makes each new form possible.
What makes biological organisation possible within physical organisation?
What makes mattering possible within biological organisation?
What makes increasingly differentiated consciousness possible within organisms?
What makes social significance possible?
What makes meaning possible?
What makes meaning capable of referring to itself?
And what makes an observer possible within all of this?
These are not separate questions.
They are related questions about the organisation of possibility.
This is why the notion of the possibility space has mattered throughout the series.
A conceptual distinction does not merely describe what we already know.
It makes some questions easier to ask and others harder.
It makes some solutions visible and others invisible.
It can therefore control the possibility space of inquiry.
The task is not to abolish distinctions.
Without distinctions, there is no intelligibility.
The task is to know what our distinctions are doing.
A distinction can be illuminating without being ontologically fundamental.
Beyond the hard problem
So perhaps we can finally return to the question with which we began.
Why is there something it is like to be conscious?
It remains a legitimate question.
It remains difficult.
Perhaps it will remain mysterious for a very long time.
But it no longer has to be the first question.
Before asking why experience accompanies physical processing, we can ask how the physical became biological.
Before asking why the biological became conscious, we can ask how biological mattering became possible.
Before asking why consciousness became reflective, we can ask how primary consciousness became socially and semiotically reorganised.
Before treating phenomenal experience as a primitive datum, we can ask how experience became available to us as something that could be isolated, named and philosophically examined.
Before treating the observer as external, we can ask how the observer itself became possible.
And before treating the gap between physical and phenomenal as an ultimate feature of reality, we can ask how much of that gap was produced by the way we construed the phenomenon.
The hard problem may therefore not be something we defeat.
It may be something we move beyond.
Not by solving it from above.
By following the history beneath it.
By restoring the organism to the physical.
Mattering to the organism.
Experience to the organism's history.
Sociality to consciousness.
Meaning to experience.
And the observer to the world it observes.
Then the question changes.
It is no longer:
How does consciousness get into the world?
It becomes:
What kinds of organisation allow a world to become significant, experienced, meaningful and reflectively intelligible from within itself?
That question is still hard.
But it is hard in a different way.
It does not begin with a gap.
It begins with a history.
And perhaps that is where a natural philosophy of consciousness should have begun all along.
After the hard problem
There is one final irony.
The hard problem seemed to demand an answer.
But perhaps what consciousness needs most is not another answer of the same kind.
It needs better questions.
Questions that do not prematurely decide what must be explained.
Questions that allow physical, biological, social and semiotic organisation to remain distinct without turning their distinctions into ontological walls.
Questions that let us ask not merely what something is, but what it has become.
Not merely what exists, but what has become possible.
Not merely how one thing causes another, but how relations reorganise what each can be.
And above all:
How did this become the problem?
That question does not dissolve consciousness.
It does something more useful.
It gives consciousness a history.
And once consciousness has a history, the mystery is no longer a blank space between two worlds.
It becomes a trajectory through one.
Perhaps we have been looking for consciousness in the wrong place.
Perhaps it was never waiting to be found.
Perhaps it was becoming.
And perhaps the observer who finally noticed was part of the becoming all along.
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