On the Hard Problem

It may be helpful to arbitrarily impose some logical constraints on the territory investigated when asking “Why should neural computation and information processing give rise to felt experience at all?”. The obvious constraints might be to not assume any supernatural factors and, more precisely, to begin with the constraint that felt experience, if present, must be generated by the cognitive system of the organism in the context of natural selection. To proceed with the question if the hard problem within these constraints one needs to deal with some analysis of what is known about felt experience before dealing with the question of why should experience be felt?

What is felt experience? In the case of humans (and likely other creatures) felt experiences incorporate affective and perceptual content, and memory. Felt experiences are predictive in their construction. Felt experiences are composed of the activity of multiple cognitive modules, such as visual, auditory, long term and short term memory, affective inputs. As composite cognitive activity, felt experiences are emergent in nature, characterised by seemingly limitless levels of nested abstraction and recursion. Felt experiences are experiences that include a sense of supervening awareness among the other composited cognitive inputs. The ‘felt’ term of the hard problem causes trouble because it is a vague term used to indicate the more vaguely defined cognitive phenomenon of consciousness. The phrase ‘supervening awareness’ may be equally troublesome, but can be used to assemble some of the features of ‘felt experience’, namely ownership (this experience belongs to me, this self, this body) and immediacy (this experience is happening now). Notice how the felt feature of ownership already includes some nested and recursive variable abstractions - me, self, and body, are useful illusions, pragmatic summaries of a multitude of chemical and neural activities and pathways. Given the constraint that felt experience is generated by the multiple modules of the cognitive system one must consider what is indicated by ‘felt’ implies predictions incorporating interoceptive and affective abstractions of body function, situation and location, and level of arousal and wakefulness, to name just a few contributors to a more abstract predictions of ‘this-ness’, ‘now-ness’, and ‘my-ness’.

If one accepts the predictive theory of cognition, then what is the problem of the cognitive system predicting an experience of felt interior awareness - a prediction that renders the experience of conscious subjectivity.? Metzinger proposes that the minimal experience of consciousness is a prediction of basic arousal. If the self is easily accepted as a cognitive illusion, why not accept that consciousness is also an illusion - in the sense that both might be predictions? Like consciousness, proponents of the hard problem, point to the ineffable nature of qualia. Adherents of the predictive theory of mind do not deny the role of prediction in constructing the type of qualia perceived - these can be illusory (blue dress/ white dress). Why not the experience of experiencing qualia itself? Once one Accepts that the self is a cognitive construction (an illusion) why stop there? If one looks for consciousness it is also illusory, consisting of thoughts, feelings, moods, experienced by who - the illusory self. If there is no recipient of the so-called conscious experience and what you are calling conscious experience seems to always relate to some content, one must be open to the idea that consciousness is also an illusory cognitive construction that appears with any attention getting action of the body and brain.

Important to note that meditation aficionados like to point out that they can manifest cognitive states of ‘pure consciousness’, or awareness stripped of self, body, or passage of time. Rather than upending the above analysis of what is ‘felt experience’, these refined experiences merely attest to the variable nature of conscious experience, where through discipline, practice, or pharmaceutical influence, the variable contribution of cognitive modules can be adjusted, for example to diminish predictive activities that give rise to discursive thought, memory, bodily awareness, self, ownership, etc. These attributes may be mostly dormant for the duration of the ‘pure’ consciousness experience but it is doubtful that they are utterly extinguished. As Metzinger points out, how is it possible to claim that ‘I’ had an experience of pure consciousness if there is no sense, however minimal of that experience belonging to me, even if this is being recalled in memory after the experience has subsided.

The ‘why’ part of the problem is constrained by natural selection. Why would it be advantageous for an organism to evolve a multi-sensory, multiply modular cognitive system capable of producing on-demand summative nested abstractions of immediate self-attribution of its experiences? This question is often challenged at the outset by the fact that human body with its brain and nervous system can accomplish almost any task without conscious awareness. The most likely answer has to do with the cognitive demands introduced by the novelty and complexity of the organism’s world of significance, its Umwelt. The predictive capabilities of the organism would be selected for reproductive fitness. Novelty and complexity abound in human experience including extreme variation in environment, social and cultural configurations. ‘Felt’ experience renders immediacy and consequential ownership of cognitive activity where processing of novel and complex information is occurring. This doesn’t imply that novel and complex information processing must be felt, for example blind sight experiments, but rather that we display the capacity for conscious awareness for some cognitive activities some of the time and without this ability we would be less fit to meet our novel and complex cognitive demands. Nor does it imply that ‘felt’ experience is binary off or on, for example while dreaming our composition of awareness is altered, diminishing bodily awareness, while preserving some degree of self awareness, perhaps less rigidly rendered given our ability to become versatile improv actors in our imaginative dream scenarios. So the answer to why is adaptive selection.

The problem of ‘how’ is hard, not because it is impossible for nature to produce abstract information in living systems; for convincing research on this question - see N. Kukushkin, or S. Grossberg, for example). These researchers along with others (for example M. Graziano, A. Seth, K. Friston, M. Sohms, philosophers T. Metzinger, A. Clark, J. Howley) are making progress in identifying critical features of the central nervous system that support felt experiences, and proposing mechanistic mathematical models of novelty response.

The problem is also hard because it involves the full complex spectrum of nature and nurture relationships to account for the adaptive fitness of felt experiences. On the neurobiological side is the variety of cognitive modules and their contribution to combined, abstract, and recursive images (which are not transparently decomposable by the experiencing subject to their constituent inputs - for example an emotion cannot be accurately decomposed by the subject to the various affective contributors such as body temperature, hormone release, gut disfunction, memory, etc). On the nurture side one has to look at how our cognitive mechanisms function and support our social nature including reproduction and mating, child development, learning and maturation, parenting, cooperation and collaboration behaviours, etc. As individuals we change over the course of our life histories and as social animals we occupy unique and changeable statuses, and roles in social hierarchies. The need for attribution of self/other distinctions, reflexive self assessment of satisfactory or unsatisfactory behaviours, would appear to be, at least partially, supported by evolved cognitive features that render abstractions of arousal, surprise at novelty, attention and immediacy, ownership and consequential weighting of experience.