When Would We Know? — A Natural History of Consciousness: V. When a System Became a Point of View

A point of view does not require a person.

It requires a difference between what happens to a system and what happens within the organisation of that system.

A stone can be warmed by the sun.

An organism can encounter warmth differently depending on what warmth does to its continuing activity. One condition may sustain it; another may threaten it. The difference is not simply in the environment. It is a difference in the relation between environment and organism.

A point of view begins to emerge when the world is organised around such differences.

The organism does not need to say, “This is good for me.”

Its organisation already distinguishes possibilities in terms of what they permit.

Some can be approached.

Some avoided.

Some incorporated.

Some resisted.

The world has acquired a structure of relevance.

This may be why consciousness cannot be reduced simply to information processing. Information can be processed without anything necessarily mattering to the system doing the processing. A point of view requires more than differences being detected. The differences must participate in an organisation whose future depends upon them.

That gives us a possible natural history:

difference → mattering → organisation → perspective.

At first, differences simply occur.

Then some differences begin to matter to a system because they alter its possibilities.

The system becomes organised around those differences.

Eventually, the world is encountered through the organisation those differences have produced.

A point of view is therefore not necessarily a little observer sitting inside the system.

It may be the system's organisation itself.

This also changes the question about artificial consciousness.

We need not ask whether a machine has secretly acquired a miniature human observer.

We can ask something more structural:

Has the system become organised around differences that matter to its own continuing activity?

If so, perhaps a point of view is beginning to emerge.

And if a point of view can have a history, the next question becomes unavoidable.

What happens when that history itself begins to matter?

When does a system's past become part of the point of view from which its future is encountered?