Emergence and Consciousness Reconsidered
This is a follow-up to a conversation I had with Daniel Tarpy on the topic of emergence and consciousness (which you can find on my or Daniel’s YouTube channel; also, an audio/video version of this essay is available here). Preparing for the conversation and having the conversation really helped me figure out my own views on emergence and on consciousness as a possible emergent. Here I want to state those views more clearly than is sometimes possible when you’re having an extemporaneous conversation.
Emergence as Processual Transformation
So what is emergence? First of all, forget all those fancy concepts you may have heard about in connection with emergence. Forget about supervenience, forget about downward causation, forget about strong emergence, forget about weak emergence, forget about nomological dependence, forget about causal dependence, forget about types, forget about tokens, forget about unpredictability, forget about nondeducibility. In my view, those are all obsolete. Let’s simply say that emergence is the transformation of things through their interaction with other things. And, fundamentally, I would say that the things interacting and undergoing transformation are processes. As Thomas Alexander put it (in The Human Eros), there is “process and metamorphosis at the heart of things.”
Already through reading Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science, I was doubtful that unpredictability or nondeducibility were useful defining features of emergence. As Nagel argued, what is deducible is theory dependent. This means that what is not deducible according to one theory may be deducible according to another theory. On a related note, William James long ago criticized (in his Some Problems of Philosophy) the method of “infer[ring] matters of fact from conceptual considerations.” To put it bluntly, epistemology doesn’t imply ontology. Deducibility and predictability are features of the state of our theories about the world, not features of the world we are theorizing about.
So I reject David Chalmers’s definitions of “strong and weak emergence” in his essay of that name. The definitions, based on nondeducibility and unexpectedness, use epistemological considerations to infer ontology. Again, whether something is deducible or not, or expected or not, is a feature of theories, not a feature of the world as such. If my friend acts in a way that’s unexpected, it’s unexpected to me, and reveals a deficiency in my theory of my friend. To my friend himself or to another observer, the act may have been totally expected.
Along with epistemological criteria, I reject part-whole approaches, level-based approaches, supervenience approaches, and the concept of downward causation. The idea of a whole emerging from a combination of parts, which then “supervenes” on those parts, and perhaps exerts causal influence on those parts, comes, as far as I can tell, from a mechanistic orientation. But the kind of emergence you get in putting together a machine, which is indeed a whole greater than the sum of its parts, is a special case of emergence; it’s not typical of emergence generally. The idea of “levels” supervening on each other also has too much of a dualistic flavor for me.
Instead, I would align myself with the processual-organizational approaches you find in pragmatism and in the writings of Mark Bickhard, Terrence Deacon, Michael Silberstein, and others. Emergence comes about, according to this view, when processes interact with and mutually transform each other, leading to new organization, new properties, new behaviors. Instead of levels, we can think of processes at different scales “nested” within each other (as Deacon puts it), or of entangled “systems and subsystems” (Silberstein), or of “tangled hierarchies” (Bickhard borrowing from Douglas Hofstadter).
I think Terrence Deacon’s distinction between homeodynamic, morphodynamic, and teleodynamic processes is especially helpful (see his Incomplete Nature). It’s possible that everything in the universe can be understood as emerging through interactions of these three basic processes. To oversimplify, you can think of these processes as equilibrium-tending, pattern-producing, or survival-seeking. The basic tendency of the universe seems to be equilibrium-seeking, or homeodynamic. Things tend to become less ordered over time, tend to become more similar to their surroundings, unless work is done to maintain them. But when different equilibristic processes interact, the result is not always greater equilibrium. Some cases of interacting homeodynamic (i.e., equilibrium-tending) processes produce morphodynamic processes (e.g., natural patterns: whirlpools, snowflakes, crystals). And when certain cases of interacting morphodynamic processes interact they produce teleodynamic (target-directed, survival-seeking) processes (such as the self-preserving processes that mark life). Possibly everything from new stars to new societies can be explained in terms of complex interactions of homeodynamic, morphodynamic, and teleodynamic processes. Which is not to say that the new thing is reducible to these processes, only that historically the new thing was a product of these processes interacting with and transforming each other.
Consciousness as an Emergent
And what about consciousness? Let me first say that I prefer to avoid the term “consciousness” as much as possible. This is not because I think there really is no consciousness, but because consciousness has several distinct meanings depending on which philosophical or psychological system you’re considering. In order to be coherent with other things I’ve said and written on this topic, I’ll use the word “experience” to refer to consciousness in the widest sense. By this I mean the sensory side of behavior (feeling, sensing, perceiving, imagining, etc.) as analytically distinct from the acts that are guided by it and bring it about. I use the word “experience” to emphasize the “sensory” side of “sensorimotor.” As I’ll argue, however, this experiencing is always active; it’s always within motor behavior, not as an add-on, but integrated right from the start. There is no ultimate distinction between behavior and experience, between doing and undergoing. The term “sensorimotor” is apt because, for an organism, the sensory always involves the motor and the motor always involves the sensory.
But before getting into this, here’s what I reject in thinking about experience as emergent.
I reject the hypothesis that experience is fundamental if that means that it emerged with the emergence of the universe itself. However, it seems reasonable to say that experience is a fundamental potentiality of the universe. I think experiencing did not exist in actuality at some time and then it did. The fact of its later existence shows that it was potential or latent in what came before. Moreover, along with Dewey I believe living organisms are continuous with inanimate matter, and if nonliving matter was totally antithetical to and totally unlike living matter, life would never have gotten started. And I agree with Dewey when he writes (in Experience and Nature) that “‘Effects,’ since they mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate indications of the nature of nature than are just ‘causes.’” If you want to know the nature of nature, just look around you at what it has produced (its effects).
So, for me, experience as actual is emergent, not fundamental. But emergent in what sense?
Daniel and I joked around in our conversation about the idea of me being a panpsychist. But I don’t believe there are any versions of panpsychism that quite match my views. The closest match I know of is Philip Clayton’s “gradualist panpsychism.” Clayton argues that basic nonliving particles and chemical elements do not have consciousness, while the first self-reproducing cells do have it in some manner. I agree with this. However, Clayton also brings in God at a certain point to complete his explanation, while I would avoid bringing in God.
Usually, however, panpsychism is associated with the view that even elementary particles have some version of subjectivity. Galen Strawson, a leading panpsychist, argues that you simply can’t get to experiential phenomena from non-experiential phenomena; at least some “physical ultimates,” he says, “must be intrinsically experiential, intrinsically experience-involving.”
I disagree. I would prefer to say, along with Dewey, that nonliving elements show biases in how they interact with other nonliving elements, and these biases were important for getting life started. But nonliving elements don’t care about the interactions they have. It would not be appropriate to say that a hydrogen atom wants to, say, combine with an atom of oxygen rather than an atom of carbon. Hydrogen’s bias toward one or another interaction can be better explained in other ways. No caring, no experience. I believe that you only get something that could be called wanting and caring and trying — and thus something in the neighborhood of experiencing — when you get a living cell. Experience in actuality is fundamental, but only when life gets started.
I associate this view not with panpsychism but with Deweyan naturalism and with the biosemiotics of people like Thomas Sebeok, Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, etc. The point being, I’m not a panpsychist as most people would define it.
I am also not a typical physicalist. A typical nonreductive physicalist — or anyone, really, who’s been taken in by certain popularizers of neuroscience — would probably accept John Searle’s declaration (in his 2000 article “Consciousness”) that:
Consciousness and other sorts of mental phenomena are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the structure of the brain. In a word, the conscious mind is caused by brain processes and is itself a higher level feature of the brain.
I find at least two problems here. First of all, consciousness is seen as an effect or “higher-level feature” of the brain. But what sort of effect or feature is it? He obviously doesn’t want to see it as immaterial in a dualistic sense. But then what? Searle explicitly rejects dualism, but it’s hard not to interpret his statements about the brain and consciousness dualistically.
The other problem is the inherent neurocentrism. Is the brain really all that’s important? I believe this is a form of the mereological fallacy, of ascribing properties to a part of something that are really properties of a whole. Without getting into the weeds, in my view this neurocentrism has been devastatingly critiqued by psychologists and philosophers like Edmund Jacobson, F. J. McGuigan, Peter Hacker, the enactivists, and many others. The brain is important for experiencing in animals, of course, but even among animals it’s only one factor among many. The view that the brain as such causes consciousness is as misguided to me as the view that consciousness goes all the way down to so-called “ultimate particles.”
Dualism is also a nonstarter for me. Most forms of emergentist dualism I’ve come across are very vague about how experience comes about. On David Chalmers’s view of naturalistic dualism, how exactly do you get human subjectivity from dual-aspect physical-phenomenal information? On William Hasker’s view of emergentist dualism (expounded in The Emergent Self), how exactly does the brain generate the immaterial “field of consciousness”?
There does seem to be a kernel of truth in Hasker’s “field of consciousness” view. Research into bioelectromagnetism demonstrates that organisms do produce fields of various sorts. These fields probably play some role in what we call experience. To identify any of them with experience, however, would be another form of the mereological fallacy. In any case, I feel that dualism leaves us with more mysteries than when we started.
So how would I go about explaining the emergence of experience? I won’t go into all the details here. For me, the basics were already put in place by early-20th-century thinkers like John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Edgar A. Singer Jr., E. B. Holt, Knight Dunlap, and others. Biosemioticians like Thomas Sebeok, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, etc. have perhaps best developed this line of thinking in the present moment. And physiological psychologists like Edmund Jacobson (Biology of Emotions) and F. J. McGuigan (Cognitive Psychophysiology) have provided critical insights about the role of various bodily systems, not just the brain.
To put it simply, the organizations of materials that make life possible, the behaviors that keep it going, and the sensory-perceptual experiencing that guides those behaviors — these are a necessary and integral unity. You can’t have life without behavior, and you can’t have behavior without experience in at least some rudimentary sense. We separate anatomy and physiology and behavior and experience out for the purposes of special investigations; but it is a profound mistake to lose sight of the original unity of organic matter, behavior, and experience.
To put this another way, there is no hard problem of consciousness as David Chalmers formulated it. There is no problem of why consciousness exists. It exists because it’s necessary for successful behavior, and such behavior is necessary for the persistence of life itself. A living cell that could not do anything — that could not seek out and take in some bits of the environment and avoid other bits of the environment — would not survive. And if there was no feedback to the cell, no sense or feeling about whether this or that bit of the environment was good or bad for it, its behavior would be pointless.
Chalmers would argue that this behavior could go on, as it were, in the dark. But this is to claim that one could live a successful life under general anesthetic, which seems to me an obvious absurdity. The closest we get to this in nature are conditions like congenital insensitivity to pain. But people with such conditions are lucky if they survive to maturity. Clearly, pain and other forms of experience are deeply important for the continuance of life. (Perhaps a good working definition of life is “that which is susceptible to anesthetic chemicals.” Consider that “anesthetic drugs are effective in organisms ranging from paramecia, to plants, to primates.” General anesthesia, of course, suppresses both behavior and experience.)
So there’s no hard “why” question about experience. There are interesting and complex questions about how experience is conditioned by various organismic structures, processes, social formations, environments. But these are hard questions only in a technical sense, not a conceptual sense. We should expect that experience for creatures with eyesight is different from experience for creatures without eyesight. There’s no mystery in the fact that organisms with different organs and different behavioral possibilities should experience the world differently.
If experience is of a piece with the living process itself, then the only relevant “hard problem” is the problem of the emergence of life. And this problem seems to get more tractable by the year. Personally, I lean on the work of Terrence Deacon (and his colleagues) and Nick Lane (and his colleagues). But there are other viable hypotheses out there about the origin of life.
The Inner World
What really seems to trip people up in making sense of experience is the modern human sense of having an “inner subjective world.” I don’t think most people find it mysterious that we should see and hear and smell what’s going on around us in our immediate environment. But why should we be able to see and hear and even smell things that are not in what we take to be our real-life surroundings? I can sit in my little office surrounded by apparently real books and papers and pens and coffee cups, while in my inner world I am in some tropical paradise I’ve never actually seen, doing things I’ve never done; or reliving (with who-knows-what accuracy) some past episode of triumph or humiliation. How could this seemingly autonomous inner world of thought and memory and imagination be of the same stuff as the unforgiving practical outer world — not to mention of the same stuff as this bag of meat and mucus and gas that we call a human body? Is there not, then, some fundamentally mysterious “mind” or “soul” floating around somewhere inside of me or above me which is my true self?
The mystery of this inner world is deflated when you begin to realize that it’s simply a transformation of normal perceptual and verbal behaviors. Without getting into details, humans evolved the sort of anatomy and physiology that allows them to act in overt, public ways as well as to act in subtle, private ways. By acting in overt ways you can talk to the people around you; by acting in very small ways you can talk just to yourself. By acting with respect to the world around you, you come to perceive it. By later acting in similar ways but on a reduced scale, you can perceive that world when it is absent (say when you close your eyes or move to a different location). By manipulating your public behaviors, say by walking around or standing on your head, you can perceive the external world in new ways. By manipulating your small-scale, private behaviors you can come to perceive things that do not even have a real-world existence.[1]
(I should add that this behavior of perceiving objects in their absence [as B. F. Skinner termed it] hijacks your sense organs. This is why you can’t normally clearly perceive external objects and absent objects at the same time: the more distinctly you perceive the absent object, the less distinctly you perceive present objects. However, it seems that the ingesting of certain substances, as well as certain neurobehavioral disorders, allow you to more freely combine present and absent objects into a unified experience.)
An important point is that when we act in these subtle or covert ways, the behavioral element often becomes invisible to us. When we daydream of a vacation in a tropical paradise, we often don’t notice that this daydream is a muscular behavior. In this way we have the illusion of a kind of autonomous mind separate from the body. If there is a sense in which illusionism about consciousness is true, I think it’s this: the illusion that we can have experience (as in the experience of a private, inner world) without acting. But the experiments of physiological psychologists like Jacobson and McGuigan demonstrate that the body is just as involved in experiencing the “inner” world as it is in experiencing the outer world.[2] In fact, you can train yourself to be sensitive to your body’s behaviors when you wonder whether you left the stove on, or fantasize about getting it on with that good-looking member of whatever gender or species you prefer.
There is much more to say here. But let me reiterate that, in my view, experience (“consciousness”) is an integral aspect or property of life itself, such that once you have explained life, you have explained experience. Life itself is an emergent effect of interacting morphodynamic (pattern-producing) chemical processes; the maintenance of this interaction over space and time requires the simultaneous emergence of behavior; and the emergence of successful behavior requires as part of it the simultaneous emergence of experience.
Notes
[1] “For images are not made of psychical stuff; they are qualities of partial organic behaviors, which are their ‘stuff.’ They are partial because not fully geared to extero-ceptor and muscular activities, and hence not complete and overt.” (John Dewey, Experience and Nature)
[2] “Our investigations disclose that the ocular muscles act during visualization of imagination, recall and emotion in much the same fashion (but with less action-potential voltage as a rule) as when the same person sees an object with open eyelids.” (Edmund Jacobson, Biology of Emotions)