The Trouble with Qualia: IV. The World Does Not Need a Witness

We began this series with a simple question:

What exactly do we mean when we say that pain is felt?

The question seemed innocent enough. But it led us into rather stranger territory.

We found ourselves asking whether the feeling of pain is something over and above the pain itself; whether what it is like identifies an additional phenomenal ingredient; whether the concept of a quale names something in the world or merely gives a technical name to the character of an experience.

Then we asked what happens to the hard problem of consciousness if we withdraw that assumption.

Perhaps the most interesting consequence is that we no longer need to imagine the conscious organism as containing a private observer.

The world does not need a witness.

The inner spectator

There is an old picture of consciousness that is difficult to get rid of.

There is the external world.

There is the physical organism occupying a small region of that world.

There is activity inside the organism—especially in the brain.

And then, somehow, there is experience.

So we imagine an inner spectator.

The world is represented to the brain, the brain constructs an experience, and the experience is somehow presented to the subject.

The picture is so familiar that it can seem inevitable.

But who, exactly, is the subject to whom the experience is presented?

If the brain constructs an internal representation and the subject then perceives that representation, we have not explained perception. We have merely moved the problem inside the head.

The inner observer would need to observe the representation.

And if the observer itself receives an experience of the representation, we have another layer.

The temptation is then to place another observer behind the observer.

Soon enough we have a little theatre in the brain populated by an infinite regress of spectators.

The obvious solution is that there is no inner spectator.

But this does not mean there is no subject.

It means that we need a different conception of what a subject is.

The organism is the subject

Perhaps the subject is not a thing hidden somewhere inside the organism.

Perhaps the subject is the organism, considered as an organised centre of activity.

This sounds obvious until we notice how much it changes.

A person does not need an inner self to receive information about the world.

The person sees.

The person hears.

The person feels pain.

The person remembers.

The person anticipates.

The person acts.

There is no further entity inside the person who needs to perform these activities again.

The organism itself is the one to which things happen.

It is the one for which they matter.

It is the one whose future depends upon what happens next.

The first-person perspective may therefore not be something added to the organism.

It may be a characteristic of the organism's organisation.

A world for an organism

This brings us to a distinction that may be more important than the distinction between physical processes and qualia.

There is a difference between a world and a world for something.

The physical universe contains oceans, rocks, stars, molecules, radiation and innumerable processes that occur whether or not any organism notices them.

But for a living organism, the environment is not merely a collection of physical events.

Some things are edible.

Some are dangerous.

Some are obstacles.

Some provide shelter.

Some are potential mates.

Some indicate the presence of predators.

Some signal safety.

Some are familiar.

Some are novel.

Some can be approached.

Some must be avoided.

The physical environment does not need to contain little labels saying food, danger, friend or threat.

The organism's organisation makes those distinctions possible.

A world therefore emerges not by being created out of nothing, but by becoming significant for a particular form of life.

The organism does not need to construct a second universe inside its head.

It needs to be organised in relation to the one it inhabits.

Mattering before meaning

This suggests a useful distinction between mattering and meaning.

Something can matter to an organism without functioning as a symbol.

A chemical gradient can matter to a bacterium.

Light can matter to a plant.

A shadow can matter to a bird.

A vibration can matter to an insect.

The presence of another individual can matter to a social animal.

None of these relationships necessarily requires language or symbolic representation.

But they do require a particular kind of relation between organism and environment.

Something matters because of what it makes possible or impossible for the organism.

It affects the organism's continuation, behaviour, regulation, development or reproduction.

Meaning can develop from such relations, but mattering need not wait for meaning.

Perhaps this gives us a more promising place to begin thinking about consciousness.

Instead of asking when matter acquires an interior realm of phenomenal qualities, we might ask when living systems become organised such that the world matters to them from their own situated perspective.

That question can be investigated across the history of life.

The advantage of leaving humans behind

This also changes the scope of the problem.

Much of the philosophical discussion of consciousness begins with the human case.

We know what consciousness is because we know what ours is like.

Then we ask whether other creatures have it.

This procedure has an obvious danger.

It can make human consciousness the standard against which everything else is measured.

But consciousness, if it is a biological phenomenon, should have a natural history.

There should not be a mysterious line in evolution at which matter suddenly acquires an inner witness.

There should instead be increasingly complex forms of organism–environment organisation.

A bacterium does not need to be a tiny human in order for its environment to matter to it.

A plant does not need a nervous system to be affected by light, gravity, chemical signals, neighbours and damage.

An insect does not need to possess human-style reflection for its environment to be richly structured by possibilities for action.

An octopus does not need to have a human mind for its world to be an octopus's world.

The interesting question is therefore not simply:

Which organisms have qualia?

It is:

What kinds of organism–world relations have evolved, and what forms of experience belong to them?

That question allows consciousness to become a biological problem rather than a test of whether non-human organisms possess miniature versions of ourselves.

The world does not appear inside the head

This perspective also invites us to reconsider perception.

The familiar picture says that information from the world enters the organism, is transformed by the nervous system, and eventually becomes an internal representation.

But an organism is not merely a receiver.

It acts.

It moves.

It samples its environment.

It changes its position.

Its movements alter what it can perceive.

Its previous experience changes what it attends to.

Its bodily state changes what matters.

Its expectations influence what it detects.

Perception is therefore not simply the passive arrival of information.

It is part of a continuing relation between organism and environment.

The organism explores the world, and the world constrains the organism.

Neither side needs to contain the other.

The tree does not have to be reconstructed inside the observer in order for the observer to perceive the tree.

The organism must instead be organised so that its activity can be responsive to the tree.

This does not make perception simple.

It makes it relational.

And what of the first-person perspective?

There is still an obvious objection.

Even if an organism is dynamically related to its environment, someone has to experience that relation.

But perhaps this sentence quietly reinstates the inner spectator.

The organism does not need someone inside it to experience the relation.

The organism is the someone.

There is no contradiction in saying that an organism is both a physical system and a subject of experience.

We regularly distinguish things without turning the distinctions into separate entities.

A whirlpool is water, but it is not identical to any particular molecule of water.

A living organism is matter, but it is not adequately described by listing the matter of which it consists.

A melody is a pattern enacted by physical events, but it is not an additional substance hovering above those events.

Likewise, an experienced world may be a mode of organisation of a living system rather than a second world existing inside it.

The distinction between the physical organism and the experiencing organism is real.

But it may be a distinction of organisation and perspective, not of substances.

The disappearance of the private theatre

If this is right, something rather interesting happens to the traditional problem of subjective experience.

The privacy of experience no longer requires a private object.

My pain is private in the ordinary sense that I am the organism undergoing it.

You cannot simply occupy my nervous system and experience my pain from the inside.

But that does not mean there is a private phenomenal substance called my pain sitting somewhere beyond scientific description.

The privacy follows from the organisation of the organism.

Likewise, the fact that nobody else can directly see exactly what I see does not imply that my visual experience contains a mysterious visual object inaccessible to everyone else.

It means that each organism occupies its own position in the world and has its own history.

First-person experience may therefore be private for much the same reason that a life is private.

There is no need for a metaphysical curtain.

What then becomes of the zombie?

The philosophical zombie now looks rather different.

A zombie is supposed to be physically indistinguishable from a conscious human but to lack experience.

The thought experiment gains its force from the intuition that we can hold all the physical facts fixed while subtracting the phenomenal facts.

But if experience is a mode of organisation rather than an additional ingredient, the subtraction becomes less straightforward.

What exactly are we removing?

The neural activity?

The organismic organisation?

The behavioural dispositions?

The capacity to discriminate?

The first-person perspective?

If all of these remain exactly as they are, what is left to remove?

Perhaps the zombie remains imaginable.

But its conceivability no longer obviously tells us anything about ontology.

We can imagine a great many things by stipulation.

We can imagine a world physically identical to ours in which gravity simply does not operate.

The imaginative exercise does not establish that gravity is metaphysically independent of the physical structure we have described.

Likewise, imagining a physical duplicate without experience may reveal something about our concepts.

It does not by itself reveal that experience is an additional ingredient of reality.

The question remains open.

But it is now a question about the relationship between organisation and experience, rather than between matter and an immaterial phenomenal substance.

The world does not need to appear

Perhaps we can now turn the original intuition around.

We have often imagined that consciousness is mysterious because the world somehow needs to appear to someone.

But perhaps the world does not need to appear.

What needs to be explained is why some organisms are organised such that things matter to them.

The world exists independently of organisms.

But a world-for-an-organism does not.

It depends upon the relation between the organism and its environment.

The distinction is important.

The moon does not need to appear to the organism for the organism to be affected by its gravitational influence.

But if the moon becomes a source of orientation, a cue for behaviour, an object of navigation or a symbol in a culture, it enters a different kind of relation.

The physical world is not waiting for consciousness to illuminate it.

Rather, living systems carve out fields of significance within their encounters with it.

Perhaps experience belongs to that process.

From mattering to meaning

At this point the question begins to connect with a larger story.

Mattering does not require symbols.

But symbols can emerge from systems in which things already matter.

An alarm signal matters before it means something in the fully symbolic sense.

A bird's call may coordinate behaviour before it becomes detached from the immediate situation.

A gesture can acquire significance within a social relation.

Eventually, organisms can inhabit semiotic systems in which things do not merely matter but mean.

Human consciousness then becomes extraordinarily complicated.

We can experience not only objects but possibilities, memories, imagined futures, other people's perspectives, mathematical relations, fictional worlds and meanings embedded in language.

The human world is saturated with signs.

But perhaps this extraordinary symbolic world rests upon something more basic.

Before the world can mean something to us, it must be capable of mattering to us.

And before it can matter symbolically, we must already be organisms for whom things matter.

This suggests that consciousness should not be treated as a sudden metaphysical interruption in the history of matter.

It may belong to a much longer history in which matter becomes organised into living systems, living systems become increasingly responsive to their environments, and some of those systems eventually become capable of inhabiting worlds of meaning.

So where does this leave the hard problem?

Perhaps not solved.

And that is important.

There is a temptation, once a philosophical distinction has been criticised, to declare victory.

We have no need to do that.

The experience of consciousness remains remarkable.

We still do not possess a complete account of why particular forms of biological organisation are accompanied by particular forms of experience.

We still do not know precisely where to draw boundaries between different forms or degrees of consciousness.

We do not know how far down the evolutionary tree subjective experience extends.

We do not know whether consciousness has a single underlying organisation or many.

And we certainly do not yet possess a theory that predicts what an unfamiliar organism's experience must be like.

These are serious questions.

But they may be questions that become clearer once we stop asking them in terms of an inner witness and a collection of private phenomenal objects.

Perhaps consciousness does not require an explanation of why the universe is lit up from inside.

Perhaps it requires an explanation of how, in the course of biological evolution, there came to be organisms for whom the universe is encountered as a world.

That is still extraordinary.

But it is extraordinary in a way that belongs to the natural history of life.

The world does not need a witness

There is one final temptation we might now resist.

We sometimes speak as though the existence of experience means that the universe finally became real when somebody noticed it.

But the universe did not wait for us.

Stars formed before eyes.

Oceans existed before nervous systems.

Life evolved before language.

The Earth did not need a witness.

What changed was not the world itself.

What changed was that, within the world, there eventually arose systems for which the world could matter.

And from those systems came increasingly elaborate forms of discrimination, response, memory, anticipation, communication and meaning.

At some point, some organisms became capable of asking what it is like to be conscious.

We are among them.

That question is itself part of the history we are trying to understand.

Perhaps this is why consciousness can seem so mysterious.

We are attempting to understand a phenomenon from within the phenomenon itself.

But we need not therefore conclude that there is a mysterious witness standing behind experience.

The witness is the organism.

The world is what the organism encounters.

Experience is the mode of that encounter.

And meaning can emerge from the things that matter within it.

The world does not need a witness.

But once living systems exist, there can be a world for them.

And perhaps that is enough to begin explaining consciousness without first having to invent a second world inside the first.