Paper ID: 2409.14545

Why Is Anything Conscious?

Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh, Anna Ciaunica

We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally-selected, self-organising, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a mathematical formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence and specific needs. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which can only be differentiated from each other by the qualitative aspect of information processing. Selection pressures favour systems that can intervene in the world to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in such systems to link cause to affect to motivate real world interventions. This produces a range of qualitative classifiers (interoceptive and exteroceptive) that motivate specific actions and determine priorities and preferences. Building upon the seminal distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, our radical claim here is that phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness is likely very common, but the reverse is implausible. To put it provocatively: Nature does not like zombies. We formally describe the multilayered architecture of self-organisation from rocks to Einstein, illustrating how our argument applies in the real world. We claim that access consciousness at the human level is impossible without the ability to hierarchically model i) the self, ii) the world/others and iii) the self as modelled by others. Phenomenal consciousness is therefore required for human-level functionality. Our proposal lays the foundations of a formal science of consciousness, deeply connected with natural selection rather than abstract thinking, closer to human fact than zombie fiction.

Submitted: Sep 22, 2024