If you’re in any way a casual visitor to the nebulous realm of philosophy, as I am, you’ll have probably heard what is known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness‘. The term, first coined by David Chalmers in the 1990s, refers to the problem of understanding why something is conscious rather than nonconscious; why there is “something it is like” to be, that has a subjective experience.
I admit, when I first heard about this problem, I was unimpressed. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about how it was presented as an intractable problem by science didn’t add up. Diving further into the topic started throwing up all kinds of woo-ish ideas that, to me, seemed to just push the question further off the charts of rational discourse: panpsychism (consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe), idealism (the universe is mind), and analytic idealism (the universe is a mental process, with a heady dose of quantum soup).
I made several clunky attempts to debunk these in online forums, and with pushback over the years, have been able to refine my rebuttal and opinions on this topic into something cogent finally worth writing down properly.
To me, all of these beliefs share the same error: that consciousness is something immutable and intrinsically special, that therefore necessitates some special explanation. In my view, this ‘specialness’ of consciousness is merely the anthropocentric error that because we are us, so must the explanation for us and our existence of mind be something foundational. If we see ourselves as amazing, then there surely must be an amazing explanation for us.
But what if we’re not special? What if, as the physicalists argue, consciousness is merely emergent in the brain when certain conditions are met? I would go one step further: that consciousness is not just emergent, it’s inevitable.
When you view human consciousness as something ‘special’, it necessitates supernatural / irrational explanations. However, when viewed as physically emergent, the physicalist argument makes far fewer assumptions. So here’s my take:
Every object in the universe occupies a unique point in time and space. So, by mere virtue of existing somewhere, somewhen, every object has a unique perspective and potential experience of the universe. This seems trivial, but it’s important. A self requires unique possibility.
Now, add senses, thinking and memory to that object and it will begin to experience what is happening to it. It can sense its environment, it can process that sensory input, and it can relate and compare those inputs and processes over time. With these abilities, it can build mental models. And a ‘me’ is a mental modal, moving through time.
In my view, any object which has those three capabilities can’t not be conscious. Experience merely requires the capability of experience: sense, cognition, memory, and—quintessentially—a unique perspective from which to draw the conclusion of ‘self’. A self is inevitable to any discrete sensing and remembering object.
You wouldn’t say that a runner can run without legs, because legs are fundamental, or that it is not the legs that run, but something else that the legs ‘channel’. It makes no sense, yet this is essentially the claim of those who say consciousness does not arise in the brain, but from something else fundamental. We don’t understand everything about the brain of course, but so far anything we can observe as conscious experience on the outside correlates neatly to stuff going on inside the brain. And it doesn’t correlate to anything else we know.
An object without sense, cognition and memory can’t experience experience, because it has no way to do so. An object acquires consciousness according to this sensing and cognitive capability. This is why we might say that a human is more conscious than an ant; because we have more processing power and sensory capability. There’s a clear hierarchy of consciousness from stone to human that correlates exactly to sense and cognition.
The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is only hard because it contains the hidden false assumption that humans are special. Remove that assumption and there’s no reason why consciousness, self and being ‘something it is like’ cannot all be emergent—and inevitable—properties of an amazing brain.
To better illustrate, try this thought experiment:
What is it like to live in Cairo?
Well, we could arm ourselves with a bunch of suitable adjectives like ‘busy’, ‘noisy’, ‘hot’, ‘sandy’, ‘vibrant’, ‘colourful’, which will give us a clue, but we won’t truly know what it’s like until we go there and experience it for ourselves. We need to be in that experience to know what it’s like.
But here’s the thing: even after living there for some time and refining our list of adjectives to describe it, we still won’t be able to adequately describe the feeling of living there to other people, because felt feelings aren’t directly communicable; we can only approximate them with words.
This is how it is with consciousness. We can’t adequately describe what it is to be conscious; we can’t adequately describe what it is like to see blue or to smell lavender, because we must necessarily be in that experience to understand it.
Consciousness is just what happens when we are inside the processes of sensing, thinking and remembering. It’s not a phenomenon; it’s a perspective.
So, what about AI then? That’s a thinking and remembering machine. Surely that can’t be conscious? I would say yes it is, but still very primitively. Even though AI can perform extraordinary computational feats and inferences, as a conscious mind, it’s still incredibly basic, has limited senses, memory and locality. Perhaps it thinks and feels at the same conscious level as a bee, driven by binary stimulus, with very basic sensing and remembering power.
That will change though, and fast. I fully expect to see 100% aware AI beings by 2030. I believe, as we begin to explore our solar system and beyond, we’ll find consciousness everywhere and in everything that offers even the most rudimentary conditions for it to exist.
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