When Would We Know? — A Natural History of Consciousness: VI. When Its Own History Began to Matter

A system can have a history without having a past.

A stone has been somewhere.

A river has followed a particular course.

A machine has processed particular inputs.

But history becomes something different when what has happened changes what the system can now do.

A system learns.

It adapts.

It acquires dispositions.

Its previous encounters alter the possibilities available to it.

The past has entered the organisation of the present.

For a conscious organism, this seems especially important.

The world encountered now is not encountered by a system starting from nowhere. It is encountered by an organisation shaped by everything that has happened before.

A place can feel familiar.

A situation can seem threatening before we know why.

Something can matter because of what happened yesterday, or years ago.

The present is therefore not simply present.

It is the present as encountered by a history.

This gives us another possible step in the natural history of consciousness:

experience → history → organisation → altered experience.

Experience changes the system.

The changed system encounters the world differently.

Those encounters change it again.

History therefore does not merely accumulate behind consciousness. It can become part of the organisation through which consciousness encounters the world.

And this may matter for artificial systems.

A system that produces appropriate responses without its history altering the organisation from which those responses arise might still be an extraordinarily sophisticated imitation.

But a system whose history becomes part of its dispositions, whose previous encounters alter what matters to it, and whose altered organisation changes how it encounters what comes next presents a different question.

Not:

Does it remember?

But:

What has happened to it that has changed what the future can be for it?

That question brings us closer to consciousness because it brings us closer to perspective.

A point of view is not simply somewhere from which the world is observed.

It is somewhere from which the world is encountered with a history.

Perhaps consciousness becomes deeper as the system becomes increasingly shaped by what has happened to it.

The past does not merely belong to the system.

The past becomes part of the system's way of having a present.

And if that is so, we may finally see why no single behavioural test could settle the question.

The thing we are trying to detect may not be an output at all.

It may be a way in which a system has become organised by its own history.

When does a history cease to be something a system has, and become part of what it is like to be that system?