I AM CONSCIOUS, THEREFORE I AM
Thoughts On Why We Are Conscious
What is consciousness? How did life originate? Are we alone in the universe? What is the solution to the marriage of general relativity and quantum mechanics? These are, among many others, some of the deepest wonders the human mind grapples with. Some are fairly recent to our catalog of existential mysteries while others have been with us since our ancient ancestors first gazed up at the heavens. In our modern time, these great questions have been left at the foot of the scientific enterprise as we patiently await new progress and developments that bring us closer to closing out these mysteries. One of them, however, is not like the others.
Consciousness and conscious experience are understood as the subjective, intrinsic qualities of what it is like to experientially be something. The mystery of what consciousness is and how it arises is the deepest mystery humanity has ever contended with, and it is clear from the current state of neuroscience and consciousness research that we are not much closer to understanding consciousness than humanity was in the age of Aristotle. The problem of understanding the nature of consciousness is unique and at once the most deeply perplexing phenomenon in the universe and the most familiar feature of our existence.
Everything we experience (every thought, emotion, sensory experience, and perception of the intrinsic and extrinsic world) ultimately takes place on the stage of consciousness. There has never, as an ontological truth, been a single word spoken, a sentence written, or a thought cognized that reveals anything about the universe as it “objectively” is; that is to say, reality that is independent of human consciousness. Everything we are certain of about reality and the way the universe seems to operate is described through this lens of human consciousness. If there is any objective truth which can approximate certainty, it is that something is taking place. Something is happening. Something is being experienced. It is consciousness that allows for this truth to be. This is indeed what Descartes was referring to with his famous philosophical axiom, “I think, therefore I am.”
What I aim to primarily explore here is the why of consciousness: why consciousness evolved as a fundamentally adaptive, Darwinian function. As complexity in organisms increases, so does the need for emotion and subjective experience as mediators between the extrinsic domain of facts and events of the material world and the inner, subjective world of value judgements and organism behavior. This essay postulates that animals also have consciousness and subjectivity, although there are likely varying degrees of richness of experience based on an organism’s complexity.
SCIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
If the whole of the scientific enterprise can be summed up in two words, it would be these: measurement and prediction. Science aims at investigating and exploring the extrinsic, material world of matter through measurement and prediction. Its primary domain is that of the unconscious world of matter, fixed laws, and predictability. In this domain, it continues to be an incredible tool for illuminating how our universe works through the human lens.
Despite science’s exponential progress over the last 400 years, we know that our knowledge of the universe is deeply incomplete. As science continues to draw back the curtain to reveal reality, the more we realize how much more there is to reveal about nature and how she works. There may be no branch of science where this incompleteness is more clearly seen than in the science of consciousness.
The Scientific Dilemma
Somewhere along the scientific journey this juggernaut of discovery had decided to essentially ignore the most fundamental feature of our existence: subjective experience. Science presses on probing deeper into reality while simultaneously adopting a “willfully blind” attitude toward the intrinsic world of consciousness. This blindness makes science not only incomplete, but wildly incomplete. Even the cherished idea of developing a “theory of everything” would hardly scratch the surface of including everything there is to be understood about the universe. It is quite telling that this is the term which was designated for unifying quantum theory and classical mechanics. Indeed, it says much of how the scientific mind thinks when a hypothetical theory that completely omits subjective experience is called a theory of “everything”. A scientific theory of everything that ignores the single most profound aspect of reality seems closer to a theory of nothing than it does of everything. Much like religious ideologies at their worst, a hubristic scientism has taken hold of much of the western intellectual mind. With its reductionist, positivist, and materialist worldview, much of the scientific enterprise has become a dogmatic engine unwilling to accept anything which runs against the grain of current orthodoxy, or is too far beyond the scope of its explanatory capabilities.
Why is this willful blindness particular to consciousness? Why is it that the most familiar and important feature of existence has been sidelined in pursuit of other scientific questions and interests? The most simple and straightforward answer for this seems to be because the problem of consciousness is difficult. In fact, understanding consciousness has proven to be the most difficult, mysterious, and paradoxical problem the human mind has ever pursued. What makes it much more problematic is that the tools of science which have worked so well in our investigations into the natural world seem to be of little or no use when employed toward understanding consciousness. The fact that science can not currently say with definite certainty that consciousness is produced by or even housed in the brain indicates how much further consciousness research must go. There is simply no certainty as to what it is, where it is located, or why it is there. As far as modern science is concerned, consciousness is the black box of all black boxes.
Neuroscientist Erik Hoel illustrates this black box problem well in his book The World Behind the World. In it he notes that consciousness science is “pre-paradigmatic”, meaning that within the field of neuroscience and consciousness research, there has never been any revelatory moment in the form of discovery or breakthrough which fundamentally changes how we understand consciousness. This can be contrasted with other branches of science, such as quantum mechanics or classical mechanics, which are very much in a post-paradigmatic stage of knowledge and understanding. Consciousness research, by comparison, is still in its infancy.
The Soft Problem and The Hard problem
In his 1995 paper titled “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, the philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers famously coined the term “hard problem” when referring to the study of consciousness. “It is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.” What he describes as constituting the easy or “soft” problem includes the reportability of mental states, the deliberate control of behavior, and the ability of a system to access its own internal states – in other words, the principle of structural coherence. Cognitive neuroscience can indeed say with certainty that there are neural correlations to experience, even if experience is not dependent on these correlations. When we have an experience of a certain nature, there is correlated activity in specific areas of the brain which is observable, measurable, and repeatable. While observable activity in the brain and the contents of experience may cohere with one another, it says nothing of the actual nature of what experience itself really is. Evidence shows that the causal link is there, but there is nothing to suggest that the phenomena of subjectivity depends on the specific brain function being observed. The hard problem is aptly named.
P-zombies
David Chalmers is often credited with popularizing the concept of “philosophical zombies”, or p-zombies. The most common of the zombie thought experiments is often used as a case against physicalism, which claims that everything in our universe, including consciousness, is physical. A p-zombie is a hypothetical creature, such as a human, which exhibits all of the outward indicators of agency; it moves, selects, adapts, and reacts but has no internally subjective or experiential qualities. The idea is, in part, to demonstrate that we can imagine a universe exactly like our own inhabited by creatures exactly like us but devoid of conscious experience. One imagines zombies driving around in cars, arguing on the street corner, and taking long walks on the beach all the while having no conscious experience. This would be an entirely physicalist/materialist world consisting only of matter and the laws that govern matter. So if we can imagine a world exactly like ours without the need for subjective experience… why is this not the reality we have?
The hypothetical zombie universe is not physically or even metaphysically possible, as the thought experiment makes it seem. Here I offer a challenge to the p-zombie argument which also does not inherently support physicalism by using the idea of reverberance mentioned earlier. It is the dynamic interplay between intrinsic consciousness and the extrinsic world which shapes and creates reality as we know it. If it is consciousness interacting with some extrinsic substrate that creates objects and the material world, then a zombie world devoid of consciousness would have no objects or coherent material nature. In fact, it would not contain anything. Without consciousness, there would be nothing to construct the extrinsic physical domain into a coherent reality; at least not in the way we have come to understand and experience physical reality.
In my view, this version of the zombie argument trivializes consciousness as something extra or not needed in a coherent physical world with biological organisms interacting with their environment. While the claim is to show physicalism is incorrect because a world exactly like our own without consciousness is perfectly coherent, it lays wide open the question of the utility, or why, of consciousness while trying to address the what of consciousness. Given what I believe is the utility of evolved consciousness, a zombie world exactly like our own is metaphysically impossible because without the role of consciousness as a critical adaptive function, the zombie creatures whom we are physically alike would not exist.
TRUTH
Every organism on Earth is a direct model of the ecological niche it fills and every feature of an organism plays an important role toward its fitness in the race for survival and reproduction. Each living species participates in the staggeringly complex web of interconnected and interdependent organisms that make up the whole of life on Earth. Each new evolutionary innovation is built upon the billions of years of evolution which came before.
Our own human mind and body were sculpted by natural selection during the pleistocene on the African savanna. The delicate curves, rigid textures, and overall composition of that sculpture were not born out of an evolutionary drive toward perceiving objective truth, but rather for achieving greater degrees of evolutionary fitness. At every evolutionary juncture, the drive for fitness and survival innovation always beats out any trivial ability for an organism to perceive any truth about the objective nature of reality. Veridical perception in regard to understanding objective truth is simply not needed from the standpoint of our genes. Our ability to discover, theorize, and eventually understand the subtleties of quantum chromodynamics, for example, hardly seems to be something our genes were aiming toward during the process of natural selection. The ability to think about and work toward an understanding of the world at such a deep and complex level seems to be merely an epiphenomenon brought about by the unique pushes and pulls of evolutionary adaptation thrust upon the human mind.
There is, of course, an entire world of truth which we have evolved to perceive. For example, the “truth” of color is an immensely important feature of our phenomenological world and is critical for the survival of the species. The adaptation of color perception exists to allow us to understand our world with a greater degree of resolution and clarity than we would otherwise have if our vision was strictly black and white (or if we had no vision at all). Colors are created when light interacts with different types of atoms which make up the whole of matter. Visible light interacting with a certain type of matter will produce a specific wavelength when reflected into our eye where it is ultimately processed as the phenomenological experience of color. Ripe apples, for example, have a different chemical makeup than rotten apples and we are evolved to see that difference in part so that we do not eat rotten apples. In the same way, fresh meat is chemically and atomically different from rotten meat. Rotten meat has significantly higher levels of compounds including sulfides and fatty acids which are produced by bacteria breaking down muscle tissue proteins. We have evolved to be disgusted by this harmful chemical process in the form of a bad smell and an awful taste. Had we not evolved to perceive these necessary truths in the form of sensory experience, the species would not survive eating spoiled food. We all see the truth of the redness of the apple and we recoil at the truth of the smell of rotten meat. This is because we are all equipped with the same evolved hardware: our sensorium. Truth, in this sense, is derived from shared experience. If we all subjectively perceive the apple as red, then we objectively conclude the apple is indeed red.
Materialists would say that a red apple exists regardless of there being an observer or not. While it may be true that something is out there, what that something is independent of our internal construction of it is not at all clear. For example, when a tree falls in the forest and no living creature is around to hear it, does it make a sound? No. Again, sound is an internal, experiential perception brought about by the interplay between our sense organs and the brain’s processing of that sensory data. What we ultimately get is the phenomenological experience of sound, not a veridical perception of the event as it is without conscious experience. Color, sound, smell, taste, and perhaps even spacetime itself is born and lives in consciousness and nowhere else.
While this says much about the human experience and the quality and nature of what our senses perceive, this says nothing about how an apple actually is independent of our perception of it. The cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman formalizes this concept in what he calls the interface theory of perception, or ITP. ITP asserts that, much like how a computer desktop hides the bare “truth” of the information it holds in the form of visual icons, natural selection has endowed us with a perception which offers no resemblance to bare, objective reality, but rather “icons” which are created and assessed on their fitness value. This does not deny the existence of an extrinsic world outside of consciousness, but that whatever lies “outside” of consciousness is wholly shaped by natural selection’s drive for fitness and survival.
Considering the above, reality as we experience it seems to be a kind of reverberance – a dynamic interplay between consciousness and a world external from our experience. The world as we perceive it is shaped by our conscious experience and we are likewise shaped by it. Reality creates consciousness, and consciousness creates reality in a reverberating and dynamic relationship.
THE UTILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Darwinian natural selection is the algorithm of life. It is the active, gene-selecting process and feedback loop in conjunction with genetic mutation which determines the specific character of an organism’s adaptive attributes. Every organism on Earth, from bacteria and birds to bees and bartenders, are adaptive creatures. Forged through natural selection, phenotypic features come in many forms such as defensive armaments and sexual ornaments, as well as adaptive software instincts such as hyperactive agency detection and Theory of Mind. Indeed, each particular feature an organism possesses was born out of the pushes and pulls of evolutionary development with the aim of maximizing fitness under a certain set of conditions. This includes not only physical adaptations, but equally critical behavioral adaptations. It is not enough for an organism to be physically equipped for survival, but it must also have the ability to behave and react to the world in a way which maximizes survival and fitness.
At some point within the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth, consciousness emerged. Exactly when and how this development started is entirely unknown and theories are purely speculative, but the fact is, we have it. I would argue that consciousness must have evolved, like all other genotypic and phenotypic features, through Darwinian means. Consciousness, with its exquisitely unique properties, is not an arbitrary feature of the universe and must have a utility. What does it do and what is it about internal subjective experience that aids in an organism’s adaptive fitness? Flight, for example, is the adaptive goal of wings and movement in water is the adaptive goal of fins. If consciousness is an adaptive tool, what is the goal? This I will explore in the proceeding sections.
Facts and Values
There is a physical world, or extrinsic stage, in which each creature participates and the inner, intrinsic world of subjectivity, emotion, and cognitive processing in which behavioral responses are formulated and ultimately demonstrated. This can be conceptualized as a dichotomy between facts and values. Things happen in the world as a matter of fact, and behavioral responses to those facts are value judgments. The precise nature of the value judgement is predicated on the organism’s evaluation (often unconscious and instinctual) of the facts which can include many variables including risk and opportunity cost.
An organism perceives a fact through its window into the world, the sensory system, and that fact is evaluated through sub-cortical processing where adaptive value responses are formulated with the aim of maximal fitness benefit. The response is then acted out in the form of behavior. To extend this further, the outcome the organism has from acting out that behavioral response can then be added to the evaluation process for consideration when it encounters the same or similar fact again. A behavior that is unsuccessful can be noted as ineffective for the future and not to be repeated, although the depth and degree of this evaluation depends on the complexity of the organism. A successful behavior or trait allows the organism to continue surviving and eventually pass its genes onto the next generation ensuring that its progeny inherits its successful genes. At the species level, a population becomes increasingly adapted to contend with the facts of its particular environment. This is natural selection.
Hardware Dependent
An organism’s ability to map the physical world of facts is entirely hardware-dependent. Let us imagine a hypothetical creature (although there are many organisms that fit this description very closely) which can only perceive two facts about the external world through a single, narrow sensory input and has the ability to employ only two value judgments from which it can act based on one or the other fact. If fact A is perceived then the organism acts out behavioral value A, and if fact B is perceived then value B is enacted. In the world as perceived by this creature, nothing exists for it outside of this narrow scope of perception and action. While it can be debated whether or not an organism might harbor consciousness at this low level of complexity and sophistication, if it did it would likely be a very rudimentary kind of experience. This creature surely would not have the hardware or cognitive software to be aware of anything outside its limited scope. For this creature, the universe is a very straightforward place where only two things can happen and in response, it can only do two things; the organism is capable of 2x2 fact-to-value mapping. In this thought experiment, if we increase the physical complexity, brain size, cognitive processing ability, and sophistication and sensitivity of the sensory inputs of the organism, we increase its ability to perceive and react. A creature with 100x100 fact-to-value mapping has 100 facts about the world it can perceive, and 100 variants of behavioral responses to those facts. As we increase further, an organism’s sensory inputs become more sensitive and more refined so that the amount of data it can take in and process about the external world becomes very large; the organism is seeing a picture of reality with a greater and greater degree of resolution. Behavioral responses, however, cannot continue to scale. Eventually, the facts about the world become virtually infinite in their number, complexity, and dynamism but the creature has access to and is capable of only a limited amount of potential value responses to those facts. It is roughly here, I believe, where the utility of consciousness plays the key adaptive role.
Fact-to-Value Mapping at the Level of Instinct and Cognition (Non-Conscious)
Much of an organism’s behavior is not learned, but inherited. We do not need to teach our infants to react to unexpected and abrupt environmental stimuli as they have a nervous system equipped to automatically do so. When a loud noise is suddenly made near them their nervous system has an automatic reaction which triggers a stress response causing the release of adrenaline and cortisol as well as physiological changes including increased heart rate and pupil dilation. These responses require no cognition, thought, or analysis as they are the result of pre-wired neural pathways in the brain. Response time to unexpected stimuli must be immediate and swift because a delay in response to potential threats, even for just fractions of a second, can mean life or death. Evolution in our ancient ancestors clearly favored this adaptive feature as those equipped with it are far more likely to survive. This is an example of complex fact-to-value mapping that is carried out instinctively by the body rather than through cognition or consciousness. A fact about the world is perceived and an automatic value response is performed. Instinct should be seen as an adaptive behavior that has moved away from the level of cognition through a species’ repeated encounters with the same stimuli over time.
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The level of cognition required for certain value formulation is dependent on the nature of the fact itself and the complexity of the hardware the organism has. With higher level organism complexity comes the ability to contend with facts that are multifaceted, multidimensional, and not presently being experienced, as in humans projecting into the future. While cognition and consciousness may not play a role in instinctive responses and behavior, they must certainly play a key role in situations and events that are wholly novel to a complex organism for which it has no instinctive script to employ. In his paper titled “A general theory of consciousness I: Consciousness and adaptation”, biomedical scientist Abraham Peper writes, “When an animal encounters an environmental situation it is not accustomed to, it will use its cognitive capabilities to solve the problem. This requires processes like analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making. The outcome of this thought process (a possible solution to the problem the animal faces) is then transformed into a sensory image which is conscious: its neural cognitive activity is translated into a form which has meaning in its outside world…. Sensory images are projections of an animal’s environment onto its neural system and they constitute what an animal knows about its outside world. When an animal encounters a situation which is new, the sensory image generated by the event is experienced consciously, or rather, the experience of that sensory activity constitutes consciousness. This consciousness is a fundamental part of any new event in all animal life and an inseparable part of the solutions found by its thought processes.” This is an interesting idea Peper asserts and I would agree with him that the organism he describes would likely be conscious, but for reasons not mentioned here. I also agree that cognition must play a role in novel situations; however, given that cognition does not necessarily require any conscious awareness, and that the experience of an emotional state is not mentioned, I am not sure that the situation he describes needs to introduce consciousness.
Some tasks clearly require greater levels of cognition than others, and this seems to be associated, in part, with familiarity and newness. Brain activity in both humans and animals when experiencing something familiar vs. novel indicates structural coherence in brain areas, and we experientially know this when we perform tasks in daily life. For example, we have all had the experience of drifting into deep thought while operating a car on the road. Seconds and even several minutes can go by while being so lost in thought your conscious awareness literally stops “seeing” the road and other objects on it - often called “highway hypnosis”. But when a chaotic, novel event enters your sensory field, such as a car unexpectedly cutting you off, we suddenly snap out of our thoughts and are again aware of our surrounding environment. It seems as though our brain was on auto-pilot and astoundingly taking turns and safely navigating the road without having direct, acute attention or awareness of it – intuition based on repeated experience takes hold of the wheel. This level of attention is in stark contrast with when we first started driving. Everything was novel and the road was complete chaos where every event required sharp and direct cognitive attention in order to navigate safely.
According to an editor at Psychology Today, “Psychologists believe that intuition relies on powers of pattern-matching, as the mind combs experience stored in long-term memory for similar situations and presents in-the-moment judgments based on them. The automatic information processing that underlies intuition can be seen in the everyday phenomenon known as ‘highway hypnosis,’ which occurs when a driver travels for miles without a conscious thought about the activity of driving the car.” It is largely thought that intuition comes from information based on experience that is housed in the subconscious mind.
The Link: Consciousness and Emotion
P-zombies may drive cars, tan at the beach, and argue with street vendors over incorrect orders, but they lack the internal experience and emotion connected with those events. There is no excitement behind the wheel, no pain from the burn of the sun, and no anger over receiving a hamburger from a sausage vendor. The world goes on cold, lacking the intrinsic dimension of emotional experience. This world of creatures lacking emotion, however, is not just an implausible thought experiment, but an impossible reality.
Emotion seems to be one of the major features of consciousness and, in my view, emotion and its relationship to value response is a critical piece in illuminating the mystery of the utility of consciousness. The seemingly infinite well of emotion and internal world of feelings the human mind is capable of is inextricably and indelibly linked to consciousness. Emotion is the color of conscious experience and the stage of consciousness and subjectivity is the platform which allows for emotion to occur and be felt. While it is likely true that emotion and cognition are not inextricably linked (for example, in pre-lingual infants), emotion is, by definition, an experiential phenomenon; and while emotion can be present at the unconscious level, conscious emotion as we experience it requires awareness of the sensation.
Like all features of the body, emotion evolved as an adaptive function and plays a role in many aspects of organism survival. In his paper titled “Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues”, American psychologist Carroll E. Izard explains that, “Emotions are motivational and informational, primarily by virtue of their experiential or feeling component. Emotion feelings constitute the primary motivational component of mental operations and overt behavior…. Basic emotion feelings help organize and motivate rapid actions that are critical for adaptive responses to immediate challenges to survival or wellbeing. In emotion schemas, the neural systems and mental processes involved in emotion feelings, perception, and cognition interact continually and dynamically in generating and monitoring thought and action.”
As complexity in organisms scales, so does the need for emotion and subjective experience as mediators between the extrinsic domain of facts and the inner, subjective world of value judgements and their expression in organism behavior. Eventually, an organism can take in much more information than it has potential value actions in response to that information. Izard further notes, “The motivational, cue-producing, and informational functions of feelings enable [organisms] to entrain, or simplify and organize, what might become (particularly in challenging situations) an overwhelming number of impulses into focused cognitive processes and a few adaptive actions (cf. Langer 1967/1982). However, feeling an emotion does not guarantee that it will be labeled, articulated, or sensed in reflective consciousness or at a high level of awareness. The level of awareness of an emotion feeling depends in part on its intensity and expression, and after language acquisition [as in humans], on labeling, articulating, and acknowledging the emotion experience.”
Emotion often dictates our course of action and behavior and it is often the most emotionally salient thoughts and behaviors that end up winning our attention and dictating our actions. The constant dynamic and chaotic nature of an organism’s environment guarantees that it will always need to contend with novel situations which are often never repeated. If an organism is in a continuous and perpetual state of taking in an abundance of information about the world (it is important to note that this is still true in low-stakes situations with little environmental stimuli), the conscious/emotional system must always be active.
Interestingly, the vast majority of our internal, subjective nature is subconscious and is not readily available to us as conscious experience. In fact, it is estimated that over 99% of our subjective experience takes place at the subconscious level, leaving our inner world largely inaccessible to our awareness and attention but immensely influenced by it. Despite not being readily accessible to our awareness, the subconscious is still a conscious state containing substantial emotional depth and information from past experience, so the assertion of emotion being linked to consciousness still holds at the level of the subconscious mind.
Gradations of Richness
Throughout much of modern history, humanity has largely understood itself to be specially, if not divinely, endowed with a sense of conscious awareness which all other creatures do not possess, and that most (if not all) other creatures operate more or less in the way a p-zombie is described. Our experiential, subjective worlds are undeniable, and as mentioned above, the only thing we can truly be certain of. Due to the subjective nature of consciousness, confirming its existence in other creatures is challenging - indeed, confirming consciousness anywhere in the universe other than our own personal experience is a challenge. The current methods of science simply do not seem capable of properly approaching and addressing the problem. However, putting the touch of solipsism aside, I firmly believe we should assume that conscious experience exists throughout the animal kingdom, for both practical and moral reasons. Given the thesis of this essay, it should not be surprising that I believe the question of consciousness in animals is less a matter of being true or false and more a matter of degree. The richness and complexity of consciousness is predicated on having hardware which can produce greater levels of complex experience. The more sophisticated an organism’s overall window into reality is, the richer the quality of experience becomes.
In 2024, several scientists and academics signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness” (as of January 2025 it has 536 signatures). It is a simple document which postulates the likely existence of conscious experience in all vertebrates and many invertebrates based on scientific research. I have this document pinned to my bulletin board as a reminder of progress and a source of amusement. The document is, without question, a marker of progress in the understanding of consciousness, but illustrates just how far there is to go: in the year 2024 science only has a hunch as to subjective experience in animals, something that, for many of us, feels remarkably self-evident. I believe science will come to find that the nature of conscious experience lies on a kind of spectrum and the richness of that experience is based on the sophistication of an organism’s hardware – hardware which evolved for adaptive utility through Darwinian means. With increased complexity in an organism’s sensory system, brain, nervous system, and cognitive processing comes a richer degree of experience. This is not to say that this spectrum is firmly linear (or perhaps not a spectrum at all), it may be more complicated than that. Perhaps the nature of experience for a fly is so qualitatively different from that of a rabbit, that understanding their subjective experience on a spectrum would be insufficient and incomplete. Roughly speaking, however, I believe that from a high-level analysis, experiential consciousness in life on Earth will be discovered to be something akin to a dimmer switch on a lamp and the brightness of the bulb will have a direct correlation with organism hardware complexity. This will, of course, lead to many subsequent open questions such as: How far down the tree of life does the gradation of experience go? What was the origination of consciousness? If consciousness is predicated on organism complexity, what kind of experience is at the dimmest setting? Indeed, what would consciousness and experience be like for an organism twice as complex as a human? And so on.
A FINAL THOUGHT
In the conclusion of his paper titled “The Mind-Evolution Problem: The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework”, neuroscientist Yoram Gutfreund concludes by saying, “Consciousness is one of the last biological phenomena about which we do not have a solid idea as to how and when it appeared and evolved in evolution. In order to identify the adaptive value of consciousness, the relationships between the brain, behavior, and consciousness must be understood. Thus, the question of how the mind emerged in evolution (the mind-evolution problem) is tightly linked with the question of how the mind emerges from the brain (the mind-body problem). It seems that the evolution of consciousness cannot be resolved without first solving the “hard problem”. Until then, I argue that strong claims about the evolution of consciousness based on the evolution of cognition are premature and unfalsifiable.”
Gutfreund is correct. In order to truly begin speculating as to the evolution and origin of anything, we must know what it is. While investigations into the evolutionary purpose of consciousness may be premature, these efforts still positively indicate that attention is being given to our deepest mystery of all. Science is clearly a long way away from understanding consciousness, its evolution, and its purpose, and perhaps we may never truly understand it. The paradox is certain: only by using our consciousness may we attempt an understanding of consciousness.
The chasing of mystery is part of what makes being human so spectacular. Even if truth, in all its forms, ends up resembling an infinitely-layered cake, at least we can still enjoy the sweetness of the journey.