What constitutes consciousness?

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

This is entry number 4 in our ongoing reply to Twenty Philosophical Questions That Are Hard to Wrap Your Head Around.? Here is the blurb that introduces it:

Unraveling the mysteries of consciousness entails delving into the workings of our minds and understanding its relationship with our sense of identity. Consciousness according to the?Cambridge Dictionary ?refers to?the state of comprehending and acknowledging something. The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as being alert and responsive, to one's environment or an individual's awareness and perception of something.

The challenge here is that consciousness has two very different frames of reference, each of which is understandable in its own terms, but not when conflated with the other.? In the chapter on consciousness in The Infinite Staircase , I focus on the second definition above—being alert and responsive to one’s environment—positioning consciousness as something we have in common with higher-order animals, including all mammals.? In this context, consciousness represents a big step up in equipping any organism’s strategy for living, so it is easy to see why natural selection would further its development.? Nothing controversial here.

The mystery stuff enters when we want to talk about experiencing consciousness, or to be perfectly specific, the conscious experience of ourselves experiencing ourselves and then reflecting on that experience, a series of recursions akin to a house of mirrors.? This is the domain of contemplating, ruminating, daydreaming, reminiscing, meditating, and the like—activities that, as the blurb notes, all relate to our experience of identity.? This is what we really care about, but here, the faculty of consciousness is just a beginning, not an end.?

To encompass the end we have in mind, we have to invoke a host of stairs in the Infinite Staircase that emerge after consciousness.? That is, our reach must incorporate our experience of values, culture, language, narrative, and analytics, each building atop its predecessors.? Needless to say, this deserves some careful unpacking.

Both values and culture emerge prior to language.? This can be seen in the social behavior of mammals and birds, as well as our own babies and toddlers.? The two classes of value that matter most are first, nurturing and protecting the young, and second, deference to an alpha leader.? These values are innate, wired into our DNA long before humanity itself actually emerged as a separate species, and we experience them intuitively without any need for verification.? This is why eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers could speak confidently about ethics being grounded in a universally present moral sense, characterized by benevolence, derived from the first value of nurture, and respect for authority, derived from the second value of deference.

Atop the stairstep of values, and again emerging prior to the arrival of language, is culture.? This can be seen in strategic behaviors that emerge in social animals that are acquired through imitation and maintained by instruction.? Chimpanzees using twigs to fish for insects inside rotting logs is one example.? Otters putting rocks on their tummies to crack open shellfish is another.? Crows preying on unsuspecting golfers who leave snacks in their carts is a third.? But even more basic than this is the herd instinct that causes all social animals to move in packs, be they beasts of the field, birds of the air, or fish of the sea.? Again, this instinct to imitate our elders and peers and instruct our young is an evolution in consciousness, a product of natural selection wired into our DNA, something that is foundational to how we all experience the world.?

Next comes language, and with it, humanity emerges as a species with unique and unmatchable powers.? In terms of identity, however, language, in its first instantiation, is not a tool for reflection.? It is instead an instrument for creating differentiating competitive advantage, having a huge impact on the power of culture to develop and maintain an ever-increasing portfolio of strategies for living.? It is not until the advent of narrative that reflection, experience, and identity can take center stage.

Narrative, the telling of stories enabled by the miracle of language, represents humanity’s first foray into understanding cause and effect.? What happened?? To answer that question, we tell a story.? It is made up of agents, actions, and objects, as well as expectations, intentions, and actual occurrences.? We use these stories to understand our world, something we can observe emerging in the development of our toddlers into children.? Toddlers are mystified; children tell stories.

Most importantly, we tell stories to children, and some of those stories are about them.? They become characters in our narratives, and from this, they learn that they can become characters in their own narratives.? They can tell stories about themselves to us.? This is the beginning of identity.

Identity is best understood through the medium of literature.? What we refer to as our self is very much like a character that moves through a series of scenes and storylines depending on all the various circumstances of the home life we have been born into.? As we develop, we engage in new contexts—playgroups, school, sports, friendships, romances, and the like.? Each context brings out different aspects of our character, and at times it can feel like we are more than one person, particularly after our adolescent hormones arrive.? At minimum, we feel the contradictions between the various roles we play, and this leads us to suppress certain behaviors in one context and express them in another.

All the while, like a reader of a novel or the viewer of a film, there is a part of us that is observing ourselves in action.? This aspect of our personality is perched on the stair above narrative, the one that belongs to analytics.? Analytics examines narratives to verify their credibility and coherence.? We learn to critique narratives early in our upbringing, beginning with parents saying sillier and sillier things until we say, “That’s not true!” and we all laugh.? We learn about lying and being caught out lying and what that means in terms of maintaining the truth of our narratives.? As the stories become more complex, we learn that truth itself is multifaceted and that it can be manipulated to private advantage, something accompanied by a loss of innocence but a gain in maturity.

The point is, this extended scope of activity, beginning with values and culture and moving on through language to narratives and analytics, is what makes consciousness so hard to grasp.? Because every step is indeed conscious, we tend to call the entire mix consciousness, but that just creates confusion.? Once we sort out the steps, we can zero in on where I believe the real mystery resides, and that is on the stairstep of narrative.

The mystery is that we are both real and fictional.? We know we are real for the same reason we know that every other living thing is real—that’s not confusing.? But to say we are fictional, well, that is a bit of a comeuppance.? So, let me see if I can make the case.

We make ourselves up.? Sure, we start with a bunch of givens over which we have no control, and we are continually interrupted by internal impulses and external events that give the lie to whatever fictions we have created about ourselves, but at the end of the day, we are who we say we are.? That act of our saying, I would claim, is indistinguishable from what any author would say about a character they are describing.? Who are we?? What do we stand for?? What do we do for a living?? Some of these are facts, part of the real world, but much of what we say is self-expression, what we believe or want to believe, what we aspire to be or fear we have become.?

These things are real in that we really are experiencing them, but they are not factual in that they are not corroborated by external events.? We test them for truth largely through the mechanism of coherence.? That is, are they consistent with all the other things we say about ourselves, and does our actual behavior consistently reflect the sum of all our self-claims.? It is through coherence to this fictional ideal that we seek to become trustworthy and respected, both by others and ourselves.

At the end of the day, the mysteriousness of identity comes from the fact that the medium itself is so fluid.? We are like actors in an improv, where we have the gist of the character we are supposed to play, working out our moves in real-time, playing off the reactions of the others on our stage.? Afterwards, when we reflect on our experiences, we are more like readers in the grip of a compelling story, deeply identifying with the protagonist, hanging on their every move.? It all makes sense in the world of fiction.? It is just weird to think of it as the real world as well.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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