When Would We Know? — A Natural History of Consciousness: IV. When There Was Something to Be Like

At some point in the history of life, there may have been a first moment when there was something it was like to be an organism.

Not necessarily a thought.

Not a sentence in the head.

Not even a self.

Just a world that mattered from somewhere.

A change in temperature could be better or worse. A chemical gradient could be approached or avoided. Something could be encountered as favourable, threatening, nourishing or harmful.

The organism would not need to represent these things as concepts.

Its organisation would already distinguish possibilities for itself.

This suggests a natural-history question about consciousness.

Perhaps consciousness did not begin when an organism acquired an inner description of the world. Perhaps it began when the organism's ongoing activity acquired a point of view: when differences in the world were no longer merely differences in what happened, but differences in what could happen for this organisation.

That does not tell us exactly when experience appeared.

It does, however, change the question.

The issue is no longer simply whether a system can say, “I experience red,” or “I am in pain.” Those statements may be produced by systems with very different kinds of organisation.

The deeper question is whether the system has a way in which the world can matter from within its own activity.

An organism maintains itself by continuously distinguishing what supports its continuation from what threatens it. Its history alters what it can encounter; its organisation alters what its surroundings mean for its activity; its activity alters the conditions under which it continues.

Perhaps experience becomes possible somewhere in this recursive organisation.

Not because information has suddenly appeared.

Not because a representation has acquired a mysterious glow.

But because there is now a system for which the difference between possible states is itself consequential.

There is a world.

And there is somewhere from which that world is encountered.

That may be what it means for there to be something to be like.

And if so, the question of machine consciousness becomes considerably more difficult.

We would no longer be looking merely for machines that behave as though they have experience.

We would be asking whether their organisation has acquired a point of view.

When does a system stop merely responding to a world and begin, in some sense, to have a world?