Consciousness as a word is too broad. It's a cluster concept that often encompasses different mental faculties like reflection, self-awareness, perception, decision making and so on. As discussed in [[What is consciousness?]], let's stick to phenomenal consciousness as what is the matter under consideration when we talk about consciousness. Primary consciousness is the ability to experience. It's the ability to have a world. There are four different stances one can take when it comes to assuming the nature of consciousness: - **Eliminativism: Consciousness is an illusion.** - In this view, no such thing has consciousness exists. It's simply a word we use for convenience like the words table or chair. Since tables don't exist in nature at a fundamental level, consciousness also doesn't exist at a fundamental level but rather **it is simply what the brain does**. - **Strong emergence: Consciousness is strongly emergent (in living beings)** - In this view, the right arrangement of matter is associated with consciousness. Since as per [[Sentient beings that are capable of suffering]], many (all?) living beings are conscious, we can postulate that under certain arrangements of matter that is found in living beings, consciousness emerges. Why it emerges isn't clear but the fact that it emerges is a brute fact. - **Panpsychism: consciousness is everywhere - it is a fundamental property of the universe** - In this view, the capacity of subjective experience is fundamental property of the universe. And just like fundamental particles aggregate to form bigger objects (molecules, stars, galaxies), fundamental subject experience somehow combines to give rise to the consciousness we experience as humans. - **Informationalism: Consciousness is what information feels from the inside** - This stance is a slight, but important, modification of the panpsychist view. While panpsychism suggests that matter is conscious, this suggests information or computation is conscious. The difference being that information/computation is interpretation dependent. E.g. depending on how you look, a wall clock can be said to be doing computations (because you define certain meanings to different atoms of the clock). For example, in Polyglot coding challenges the same code can output different outputs depending on which language's interpreter is used. The record right now is [same code interpretable in 316 languages!](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/102370/add-a-language-to-a-polyglot/231310#231310) Since we're talking about subjective experience, there's no objective test we can perform on physical objects to prove or disprove one of the interpretations above. Hence, they likely will remain experimentally unresolved and we'd have to choose an interpretation based on our intuition rather than due to any experimental fact. What makes choosing an interpretation harder is the fact that it's not clear what is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness. The question of "what is consciousness for" is relevant for all interpretations because: - If consciousness is an illusion, why would evolution invest in coming up with such an illusion? - If consciousness is strongly emergent, why would evolution line up matter precisely in a way for consciousness to emerge? - If consciousness is fundamental / information-dependent, why would evolution make the fundamental units of consciousness (be it matter or informational) combine in a way that gives rise to rich inner world Two possible answers to these class of questions are: - Consciousness is an epiphenomena. It's there as a byproduct and has no causal impact on anything else - Consciousness has _some_ capacity to save a valuable resource (that evolution optimizes for) such as energy, computation capacity, computation speed, memory and so on I'm biased towards the latter answer because it seems unlikely that such rich and consistent epiphenomena will get generated as a by product of evolution. If different modules within an organism are evolving and accumulate their specific specialities, why would a rich inner world get generated as a byproduct? Isn't it more likely that a random scattering of experiences will get generated. Our experience suggests consciousness is strongly consistent and stable - hence it is likely evolution has invested into lining up fundamental units precisely in a way to generate it. One possible answer to what consciousness is about comes from the observation that our subjective world feels strongly integrated and consistent. It seems that multiple types of information (red color, sound, smell) emerge from the same location in 3D space to inform us that a juicy apple exists there. These consistency seems to suggest that consciousness could play a role of integrating partial and error-prone data to help the organism derive useful information from noisy environment. But apparently, everything a human is able to do, we can make a robot do it as well. So if we from the inside feel conscious, then we're faced with three possibilities: 1. The robot feels conscious as well, it's alive from the inside 2. The robot does not feel conscious but we obviously do 3. Our consciousness is an illusion, nothing is going on inside us except the chemical reactions and electrical firings Our intuition lines up with the 2nd point but it's hard to say why. Unless we know precisely the relationship between matter and consciousness, we can't answer the question above definitely. For some people, this pushes them to consider that consciousness is an illusion (the p-zombie argument), but I find it odd to believe that consciousness is an illusion. Just try touching a hot iron and you'll know why consciousness is NOT an illusion. If we reject that consciousness is not an illusion, we're faced with either strong emergence (certain types of matter magically give rise to consciousness) or panpsychism (everything is conscious) or informational (all information feels conscious). I reject strong emergence because of two reasons: - Simplicity / Occham's razor: explaining why _this_ particular arrangement of matter is conscious while other arrangements aren't require an explanation which this view doesn't provide - Chauvinism towards living things. This defeats the question what non-living things are conscious by assuming *a priori* that only the matter arrangements found in living things is conscious. **This leaves us with the view that consciousness can also possibly exist outside of living beings. ** Irrespective of how it is combined in living beings like us, in principle, same can be done within other non-living systems as well. For example, some suggest that the fact that consciousness provides integrated information points to the fact that perhaps quantum super-positions are involved. But if brain uses quantum super positions for generating a unified and rich conscious experience, such super positions can be created outside of brain as well (the progress in quantum computing demonstrates this exactly). If we're to believe the quantum superposition story, then since these superpositions exist everywhere, including say an atom, we should assume simplest quantum systems also experience something. (However, this line of thought raises more questions than it answers - how superpositions communicate with classical world without collapsing (since our conscious world remains persistent, the mechanism supporting it shouldn't disappear)? if collapse never happen, what precisely do we experience as a superposition and how does a classic world emerge at all?) If informational stance is true, and brain's highest level computation feels conscious to us and we identity it as self, then: - almost all existing digital computer systems and software are conscious in some sense. - different body parts that are doing their own computations are also conscious (and not just "me" in the brain). Perhaps different selves exists at multiple levels. See [[What is a Self?]] Settling how exactly non-living things are conscious is a hard problem. But what we do know is that consciousness shouldn't be a property exclusive to living things. Adopting that view means: - Unlike what I earlier wrote in [[Sentient beings that are capable of suffering]], all living beings likely have an experience (since consciousness is everywhere). This includes plants, bacteria, fungi or so on. - Our moral circle needs to expand beyond just living beings. Since non-living things also experience something. However, assuming that consciousness is everywhere does NOT mean we need to morally weigh everything equally. For that we need to compute [[Moral weights given that consciousness is a matter of degree]].