Consciousness and its hard problems: separating the ontological from the evolutionary

Abstract

Few of the many theories devised to account for consciousness are explicit about the role they ascribe to evolution, and a significant fraction, by their silence on the subject, treat evolutionary processes as being, in effect, irrelevant. This is a problem for biological realists trying to assess the applicability of competing theories of consciousness to taxa other than our own, and across evolutionary time. Here, as an aid to investigating such questions, a consciousness “machine” is employed as conceptual device for thinking about the different ways ontology and evolution contribute to the emergence of a consciousness composed of distinguishable contents. A key issue is the nature of the evolutionary innovations required for any kind of consciousness to exist, specifically whether this is due to the underappreciated properties of electromagnetic (EM) field effects, as in neurophysical theories, or, for theories where there is no such requirement, including computational and some higher-order theories (here, as a class, algorithmic theories), neural connectivity and the pattern of information flow that connectivity encodes are considered a sufficient explanation for consciousness. In addition, for consciousness to evolve in a non-random way, there must be a link between emerging consciousness and behavior. For the neurophysical case, an EM field-based scenario shows that distinct contents can be produced in the absence of an ability to consciously control action, i.e., without agency. This begs the question of how agency is acquired, which from this analysis would appear to be less of an evolutionary question than a developmental one. Recasting the problem in developmental terms highlights the importance of real-time feedback mechanisms for transferring agency from evolution to the individual, the implication being, for a significant subset of theories, that agency requires a learning process repeated once in each generation. For that subset of theories the question of how an evolved consciousness can exist will then have two components, of accounting for conscious experience as a phenomenon on the one hand, and agency on the other. This reduces one large problem to two, simplifying the task of investigation and providing what may prove an easier route toward their solution.

Mental causation: an evolutionary perspective

“…This account extends an evolutionary argument developed in a previous paper ( Lacalli, 2023 ) that yielded two conclusions, most easily demonstrated for the subset of theories dependent on electromagnetic (EM) field effects: (1) that the events responsible for agency as a component of an evolving consciousness and those governing the character of phenomenal experience are separable and can be investigated as such, and (2) that it is possible to evolve a form of consciousness that is not epiphenomenal, but nevertheless fails to confer agency at the level of the individual. Using these results as a starting point, my intent here is to explore the concept of agency further to better understand the relationship between consciousness and agency and how that relationship could, in principle, have changed as consciousness evolved.…”

“… A hypothetical neurocircuit designed to illustrate how a pathway modulated by EM field-based extra-connectomal effects, whether consciously perceived of otherwise, could come to dominate over parallel pathways with no such modulation. The exercise repeats one in a previous paper, see Lacalli (2023) , from which the figure is modified, for details. The starting point is two parallel pathways (1 and 2) with similar output, one modulated by EM field effects (blue waves) transmitted from one neuronal cluster (T, blue arrow) to another (R, blue neurons) that responds to it by modulating pathway 2, either by reinforcing or suppressing it in comparison with pathway 1.…”

“…Neurophysical theories, as a category, are well established as a way of dealing with the phenomenon of consciousness, but represent only a subset of all possible theories of consciousness ( Atkinson et al, 2000 ; Seth and Bayne, 2022 ). A neurophysical stance is, however, the one that best suits my thought experiment, which I repeat here in abbreviated form from a previous paper, along with the relevant figure ( Figure 1 , modified from the figure in section 4 of Lacalli, 2023 ). Using fields or ideas derived from the physics of fields is widespread in the consciousness literature ( Lindahl and Århem, 2016 ), in some instances simply as a conceptual device.…”

“…This accords with a more general (i.e., theory-independent) stance taken by some in the field, that consciousness (conscious agency in this formulation) must be learned ( Cleeremans, 2011 ; Cleeremans et al, 2020 ; see also Jablonka and Ginsburg, 2022 ), or similarly, for theories where consciousness depends on the emergence of a self, that selfhood (agency implied) must be learned and achieved ( Marchetti, 2022 , 2024 ). Here I am not so much concerned with consciousness per se , but with conscious agency which, from my analysis is separable from other problematic issues relating to consciousness, including the hard problem and the nature of phenomenal experience ( Lacalli, 2023 ), and requires a real-time interactive component for agency to reside fully with the individual. If this interactive process is equated with learning, in accord with Cleeremans, then we need only focus on how agency is learned, which means paying attention to different forms of learning.…”

“…The proximate reason for writing this paper is to explore more fully an argument made by Cleeremans (2011) that consciousness must be learned. My previous analysis of the issue ( Lacalli, 2023 ) led me to conclude that this, in more precise terms, means that agency must be learned, so that consciousness of the kind we are familiar with, which confers agency at the level of the individual, requires a learning process repeated in each generation. To extend the analysis, different kinds of learning processes need to be examined to assess their ability to confer individual agency.…”