Why Is Anything Conscious?

gist

Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh and Anna Ciaunica argue consciousness starts in organisms that must read the world by valence to survive. Building on Bennett's Stack Theory, they formalize self-organizing bodies as embodied formal languages and prove that generalization-optimal learning forces a valence-first ontology. Under selection pressure this yields a hierarchy of selves. They conclude that phenomenal consciousness comes before access consciousness, so philosophical zombies are implausible.

ideas

• Valence comes before representation. Physical states attract or repel a self-organizing system at many scales, and qualities such as red are built from that good or bad processing.
• Death grounds meaning. Natural selection favors organisms that intervene in the world to stay alive, which makes their information processing subjective from the start.
• Causal learning builds a hierarchy of selves. A first-order self lets an organism tell its own interventions from observations, and higher orders model others and how others model it.
• Phenomenal consciousness precedes access. Human-level access needs models of the self, the world and others, and the self as modeled by others, so experience without access is common and the reverse is not.
• Only self-organizing adaptive systems qualify. The authors reject panpsychism and tie consciousness to vulnerable organisms tracking self-relevant information.

quotes