“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” + “Deeper Meditations #1-#6”, 2021
In a 2014 essay, I proposed the provocation: “Consciousness is evolution’s solution to dealing with big data”. When complex vision emerged around half a billion years ago, new selective pressures rewarded organisms that could make better use of limited neural bandwidth by filtering, compressing, and acting on high-volume sensory input. One efficient strategy would have been to build predictive models of the world. In complex social and ecological environments, it may have benefited some organisms to model themselves -- as abstract entities with goals, needs, and causal agency: a self -- interacting with other selves.
Consequently, I can understand and predict your actions, not by simulating the trillions of cells that constitute you, nor by solving the microphysical dynamics of your constituent particles, but through a high-level abstraction: an individual with agency, goals and needs that I can empathize with. In that view, consciousness is the interface through which I relate to you, and myself.
That was my position at the time. ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was not yet a ubiquitous buzzword. ‘Big Data’ was. My provocation was that if “Consciousness is evolution’s solution to dealing with big data”, we should expect machine intelligence, and perhaps, eventually, machine consciousness.
And here we are.
The story above is common today. As a computational functionalist, I once subscribed to it too: the right computational architecture would be sufficient for consciousness. Now, however, I find it incomplete. At best, it addresses what Ned Block calls access consciousness; it does not explain phenomenal consciousness: why any of that processing should feel like anything.
I won’t lean on Nagel’s oft-quoted “what it is like to be” formulation, because it risks dragging in the entirety of a creature’s senses, needs, goals, memories, and embodiment -- much of which is functionally tractable. Nor am I referring to self-consciousness, the voice inside my head dictating these words as I type them, or the amorphous clouds of pre-verbal concepts and ideas crystallizing into thoughts as I probe them. These belong to the contents of conscious awareness; much of their functional organization is also computationally legible, and so not my core issue. What remains unanswered by conservative physicalist and functionalist accounts is narrower, and harder: how and why there is any phenomenal character at all.
I’m writing this on a Sunday. I have a rich web of memories and associations around Sunday, and thinking of it reconstructs those memories, along with the bodily sensations and feelings connected to them. But Sunday itself has no irreducible phenomenal character for me. Whatever phenomenology it has is mediated by that associative web, which can be decomposed and represented computationally.
There is another kind of experience whose feel cannot be fully communicated through purely formal description. For example: red. Again, I have a rich web of memories and associations around red: blood, wine, sunset, my cherry sunburst guitar. But beyond those associations, my experience of redness itself has an irreducible phenomenal character -- a quale -- that cannot be decomposed into that web, or captured by any computational representation.
As someone with visual and auditory hyperphantasia (vivid mental imagery and sounds), I can see how one sensory mode can trigger another, and how, in synesthesia, a concept like Sunday might acquire a sensory quality. But this only shows a concept can recruit such a dimension; it doesn’t explain how or why that dimension has phenomenal character at all.
This is how I came to ask whether conscious experience might instead be fundamental -- an intrinsic aspect of physical reality. I don’t mean a cartoon version of panpsychism where electrons and rocks have minds, or consciousness as a separate substance from matter (substance dualism), or as the only thing that exists (idealism). What I have in mind aligns with Russellian monism: current physics describes the relational structure and dynamics of the world, not its intrinsic nature.
There is nothing magical or supernatural here. My claim is that a purely structural or functional description seems insufficient to explain phenomenal experience -- and that closing the gap may require an ontological shift.
A common objection to this appeals to a historical analogy: Vitalists believed that living organisms were so complex and mysterious that physical and chemical processes alone could not explain them, and that there must be a special life force unique to living organisms. As science progressed, critics point out, the apparent need for such a force disappeared, and the same will happen to consciousness they argue.
But the vitalists were not entirely wrong. What they were missing was not just the biological mechanisms; eighteenth-century physics lacked the physical ontology needed to explain living systems from first principles. The scientific tools developed since -- molecular biology, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, self-organization -- describe many of the mechanisms of life, but rest on physical premises they do not themselves ground. Why does a rock, left to itself, roll down a hill, while I can walk up one? Where does the free energy that powers life actually come from? Explaining this required a radical rewrite of the scientific understanding of fundamental reality: quantum mechanics and special relativity. Nuclear fusion in the heart of the sun converts mass into energy, radiated as light; that light is captured and stored as chemical energy, and later released to drive the metabolic work of those living systems.
The vitalists were wrong about a life force, but right that the physical ontology available to them was inadequate to explain how life is physically possible.
I believe we’re in a similar place with phenomenal experience. It’s not mystical or magical, but entirely natural and fundamental, and explaining it may require a shift in physical ontology. Many questions remain about the characteristics of this intrinsic feature of nature, and about what kinds of architecture -- biological or otherwise -- can organize it into unified subjects of experience, and how.
I used to believe consciousness is evolution’s solution to dealing with big data. I’ve now come to wonder whether life evolved to embody consciousness.