We have often thought of consciousness as something that belongs to an individual. A person is conscious, an animal may be conscious, and a machine might conceivably become conscious. The question is what each possesses that makes consciousness possible.
But what if consciousness is not something that an individual possesses independently of its relationships?
In a recent interview in Nature, physicist Carlo Rovelli suggests that consciousness is not fundamentally different from what was once called the soul. He rejects the idea of a metaphysical gap between different kinds of reality, and considers the possibility that a machine could become conscious.
His argument invites us to reconsider not only what consciousness is, but how it becomes possible.
A living organism does not exist independently of the physical and biological relationships that sustain it. Its existence depends on processes involving its environment, its internal organisation and its interactions with other organisms.
The organism is not simply a physical object to which life has been added. Life emerges through the organisation of processes that make the organism possible.
Consciousness presents a related question.
The brain is involved in consciousness, but the brain does not exist independently of the organism of which it is a part. Nor does the organism develop independently of its environment. Its capacities emerge through a history of relationships that shape its organisation.
Consciousness, on this view, is not an additional substance occupying an otherwise complete physical system. It is a phenomenon that becomes possible through the organisation of that system.
But the relationships involved are not exclusively physical.
Human consciousness develops within a social world. From infancy, relationships with other people participate in the development of attention, memory, emotion and understanding. The individual becomes capable of experiences that would not be possible in the absence of those relationships.
Language introduces another dimension.
A human being does not develop consciousness in a world devoid of meaning and subsequently acquire meaning as an additional capacity. The social environment already provides a system of meanings through which experience can be interpreted.
Language makes possible ways of understanding the world that are not reducible to the physical properties of the organism. It allows experience to be organised through distinctions, relationships and meanings that have developed within a culture.
The resulting consciousness is neither simply physical nor independent of the physical. It is a form of organisation that emerges through relationships across different domains of existence.
This does not mean that every relationship produces consciousness. Nor does it mean that consciousness is distributed indiscriminately throughout the world. The relationships involved have particular forms of organisation, and those forms matter.
The question is what kinds of relationships make consciousness possible.
This becomes especially interesting when we consider artificial intelligence.
Rovelli points out that present-day AI differs from human beings in important ways. It lacks a human body, human chemistry and the evolutionary history through which human desires and motivations developed.
These differences are real. But they do not, by themselves, establish what kinds of consciousness are possible.
A machine is not an isolated computational object. It has a physical constitution, an operational history and relationships with its environment. In the case of artificial intelligence, those relationships increasingly include interactions with human beings.
Such interactions can alter the conditions under which subsequent interactions occur. They can change what the system does, what people do in response, and the possibilities available to both.
None of this establishes that a machine is conscious.
It does, however, suggest that the question cannot be settled simply by comparing a machine's properties with those of a human being. We need to understand the organisation of the relationships through which different kinds of existence become possible.
The absence of human biology does not establish the absence of every possible form of consciousness. Equally, the presence of sophisticated behaviour does not establish that consciousness has emerged.
The relationship between intelligence and consciousness therefore remains an open question.
Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in treating consciousness as something that must either be present or absent in an independently constituted individual. Different forms of organisation may make different kinds of experience possible, without sharing all the characteristics of human consciousness.
This does not require us to abandon the distinction between conscious and non-conscious processes. It requires us to investigate the relationships through which that distinction might obtain.
Consciousness is not made less real by understanding it relationally. Nor does understanding the relationships involved necessarily explain everything about experience.
But it changes the question.
Instead of asking what an individual possesses that makes it conscious, we can ask how the organisation of its relationships makes consciousness possible.
Perhaps consciousness did not begin as something that belonged to an isolated individual.
Perhaps it became possible through relationships that, over time, made the individual capable of experiencing a world.
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