Systems View of Life : A Unifying Vision (9781139699945) by Capra Fritjof; Luisi Pier Luigi & Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi

Author:Capra, Fritjof; Luisi, Pier Luigi & Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi [Capra and Luisi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2016-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Guest essay On the primary nature of consciousness

Michel BitbolCREA (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) / École Polytechnique, Paris

Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one's own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure nonreflexive experience? What about the mere “feel” of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.

We start with this plain fact: the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein's expression) is no collection of objects; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other words, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one's own experience and others’ experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, or elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of the primary nature of elementary consciousness is not a scientific statement: it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.

But, conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of the many momentous successes of the neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is by virtue of the very efficience of the neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents us from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behavior of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of “having a feel”). In mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to appear irrelevant or incidental.

As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping.

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