> > The whole of life is just like watching a flick.. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house. > > _― Victor, from Terry Pratchett’s, Moving Pictures_ This post summaries my personal understanding of consciousness, I have not read widely in the topic, beyond the SEP pages on some theories of consciousness, and a few papers. I am not sure I understand most of what’s going on in those entries, and so I have not made an attempt to compare and contrast my ideas with those that are more formally defined. My attempt is to explain to myself and to those who read this, what I understand and believe, and to build on this, learn from its weaknesses etc. In a sentence, my belief is that consciousness is identical to sensation; distinguishing ‘experience’ from ‘sensation’ adds no predictive or explanatory value in the domains we can study. This is not a grand unified theory of every kind of consciousness. It is not about everything consciousness could or could not be. This is about what it appears to be in the reality we know. It is about explaining the physical, not the metaphysical. ## What IS Consciousness I think of consciousness as the experience of being. It is the ability of a living thing to sense itself and the environment around it. This is not an illusion, nor is it a separate non-physical entity. It _is_ the physical reality of sensation. I do not know of any properties of consciousness that require anything other than sensations to explain it. Both these factors are important. Life is needed because without it there is no need or even ability to react. Life wishes to continue to live, and this is at odds with the reality it is in, which has no _needs_. Sensations allow life to navigate existence. A thermostat does not react, it produces a fixed outputs given a set of fixed inputs and it desires neither the input nor the output. Disconnect the electricity and the thermostat will not panic. Reduce the amount of glucose in a bacterial culture, and boy you’re going to see some frantic activity. This is the simplest model I can think of that explains as much as possible. In my view, the sensation of being is the same as the experience of being. When I say ‘sensation,’ I’m not referring to a third-person, observable process that can be measured from the outside. Sensation is, by definition, the first-person, ‘felt’ capacity itself. We can write down _what_ sensations feel like, or reproduce the _stimulus_ that causes them, but the sensation itself is the organism’s private, physical reaction. When an organism experiences something, it is sensing that thing. Sensations take some time, limited by biology and physics, to make themselves known or heard, and so this experience might appear at a different time than an event, and this has its own ramifications. There are also abstractions that life builds on top of the sensation that allow it to sense or feel or experience other things, but all of that is (mediated by) the ability to sense. Every experience is sensation, the organism’s stimulus detection and response.1 ## What is the purpose of sensation? The purpose of anything life produces is ultimately the propagation of life. But this is often not immediately obvious because the discovery of what helps continue life is an empirical one. Integrating sensations allows for life to find food, joy, mathematics and many other wonderful things that make life want to flourish. It is a recursive process. I think the invention of sensation, of that which is sensate, was the beginning of life. It is the ability to sense along with the ability to manipulate or interact with its environment that made life as we know it on earth possible. ## Why does something feel like _that_? The specific character of any sensation is a product of life interacting with the world. Different frequencies of light have different properties2, they convey some information that is specific to them. Discovering these is beneficial to life. Over millions of years, we have learned to identify that specific feeling (e.g., redness) because it best serves the organism’s survival and propagation. I think of these as discovered constants. We have discovered constants in the world via language and observation, similarly, biology has discovered constants and figured out how they can cause sensations because we can only ever use information that we can sense.3 The same environmental stimulus can drive very different functions across organisms and even in the same organism, and conversely, similar functions can be achieved using different physical stimuli and receptors. The diversity lies in receptor biophysics, transduction cascades, and neural decoding, not in any change to the stimulus’ physical nature. The philosopher’s question ‘Why does P feel like E?’ is a misunderstanding of biology. They are searching for a universal, necessary law when the answer is contingent and evolutionary. The ‘feeling’ of redness is the specific mechanism of recognition that our lineage found useful. That’s it. We know this mapping is contingent because other creatures have solved the same problem differently.4 The function is recognition; the sensation is the biological method of achieving that function. To ask ‘why’ it feels like anything is to ignore that _the feeling is the solution_. There is no universal “redness” or “pain.” These are highly individualized, biologically useful constants that are unique to each biological system and perhaps even an individual. The identity of red as we sense it is a constant that allows our “machine” to build abstractions and navigate the world effectively. This also explains why not all of our sensations are accurate, they are useful even when they are not accurate. For e.g. Our ability to see the color purple. In the human brain for, a constant that we react to are edges. There are neurons which fire when they sense edges, and the current exploration with CNNs show that this is beneficial even for an ANN to be able to differentiate things and classify objects. Qualia are the sensation of biologically or socially learned constants. ## How is sensation organized? The “self” is a real, composite functional entity, an integrated machine of sensations, memories, and reactions, like pixels of different colors representing different objects in a photograph. The whole is almost never verbally or symbolically represented or represent-able; it is changing, and reactive. Different sensory mechanisms react in different ways to different sensory inputs and what we feel as a self, is a self-other differentiation, and this is not particularly strong, but it is measurable in fMRI studies. This differentiation is a sensed fact, which allows us to draw boundaries around our selves, providing a feeling of unity. I don’t think any human has ever experienced themselves as a perfectly synchronized One. We are legion and that is our experience also. But this doesn’t mean we’re just a chaotic, unbound collection. We’ve come a long way from Kant. Lessons from complexity theory and neuroscience show us the _actual mechanisms_ for integrating this information. The ‘it’ that unifies the ‘pixels’ _is_ the self—the learned, composite system itself. The actionable, unified event (the ‘photograph’) is created by the system’s learned drive for a specific outcome: replication and continued existence. In humans, it is the nervous system, as far as we can tell, that provides the integration of sensation. Although each cell possesses the ability to sense its own surroundings and interiors, and react and make choices, the consciousness of the individual cell is not directly accessible to us. We have developed a system dedicated to sensing and reacting. The nervous system take in the billions of sensory inputs and integrate these into something that is coherent and useful. ## Who has consciousness? Any living system that detects stimuli and reacts with flexible choices possesses consciousness, including bacteria (e.g., chemotaxis in a single bacterium), plants, simple animals, and humans. Degrees may vary by complexity: simpler systems have basic sensations, while humans have composite selves from integrated sensations/memories. Inanimate matter (e.g., rocks) or fixed-reaction machines (e.g., thermostats) lack it. I think the kind of consciousness that different organisms possesses depend on the kind of sensations they have access to, the kind of actions they have access to and the kind of map they need to build to survive. This means that the qualia of bacteria are nothing like the qualia of man. Consciousness therefore is the product of life and sensation. Life furnishes needs and evolution builds mechanisms to meet them: stimulus–response, time tracking, internal states, maps of the external world, learning, and flexible action selection. The integrated, need-driven sensing and control keeps an organism going. Some people require a certain amount of complexity to be present before they call something conscious, I do not see the need for this. If there is evidence that a biological entity is able to sense its environment, then it is sensate, and therefore conscious. If a non-biological system genuinely has needs (not just designer-imposed goal functions, but intrinsic requirements for its continued existence), develops sensory mechanisms to detect relevant stimuli, and exhibits flexible, adaptive responses, then in my view, it would be conscious. But I have not thought enough about this to have a more organized view. So I will stop here. Consciousness is often detected through observable behavioral markers: a system’s ability to sense stimuli and react with a range of choices. This is empirically tractable via neuroscience, psychology, and biology e.g., testing chemotaxis in bacteria or neural correlates in brains. But it is possible that there are conscious systems that we cannot assess or verify as being conscious, as sensation and reaction might both be just too fleeting or different from what we generally understand them as. ## Mary’s Room Mary’s Room is a famous philosophical thought experiment about knowledge and experience. Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the color red from books and descriptions but has never actually seen red herself because she has lived only in a black-and-white environment. All this is rather sad, and then one day she goes out one day and sees red light. Philosophers like to ask what happened when this happened. When Mary leaves her black-and-white room and sees red for the first time, what does she gain? She gains a new sensation, her visual system now responds to 700nm light in a way it couldn’t before. This is real learning, but she’s learning what it feels like for her sensory system to detect red light, not learning some mysterious non-physical fact. Reading about red told her what causes the sensation and how it works in other people. Seeing red lets her sense it directly. These are different types of physical information. Different ways of knowing, both entirely physical. ## On Zombies and the Hard Problem Philosophical zombies, also called “p-zombies” are imaginary beings invented by philosophers. In thought experiments, a p-zombie is physically and behaviorally identical to a real person but supposedly lacks any conscious sensation or subjective feeling. The idea is used to suggest that it’s somehow possible to have all the physical workings of a mind without experience or “what it’s like to be” that mind. All the imaginations of zombies in popular culture and fiction imagine them as thinking, sensing beings, with a hyper fixation of some kind or an automatism overriding their experience. However, their actions in the philosophical epic Zombieland demonstrate how they can only ever be realized as feeling beings. I think a p-zombie is conceivable but impossible.5 If consciousness is the sensation of detecting and reacting to stimuli in service of biological needs, then duplicating all the physical sensing and reacting necessarily duplicates consciousness. There’s no “extra ingredient” called phenomenal experience sitting on top of sensation; the experience is the sensation. We can imagine zombies because language lets us separate concepts that reality doesn’t separate. I can imagine water that isn’t H₂O,6 but that doesn’t make it possible. Once you understand that the feeling of redness is the specific way our sensory system detects and responds to 700nm light, zombies become impossible. If you copy the sensing, you copy the experience, because they’re the same thing. There’s no gap between the sensing and the experiencing because all experience is sensation from the perspective of the system doing the sensing. There is no hard problem of consciousness, there is only the hard problem of not being able to disprove the utility of preposterous thought experiments. This is an attempt at a parsimonious, empirically tractable account of consciousness in living systems without importing metaphysical impedimenta. ## Footnotes 1. The response varies vastly in complexity and I should write some more about what kind of a response would qualify as conscious, etc. For later. ↩︎ 2. sensable, physical properties that can be used to identify them, thats the information, an identity, not a use or some fundamental redness. ↩︎ 3. Maybe we discovered them **because** they cause sensation, but that is a chicken-egg problem and I won’t go there. ↩︎ 4. [^3]: Magnetotactic bacteria build internal magnetite chains (magnetosomes) that torque cells to align with Earth’s field lines, passively steering them to preferred depths. Cephalopods express opsins and light-sensitive machinery in skin; dermal photoreception locally guides chromatophore expansion for instant camouflage without routing through the eyes. ↩︎ 5. And it irritates me no end that it took me more time to understand the technical difference than take a stance. ↩︎ 6. 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