Consciousness: Confusion, Self-Creation, and Wonder

I want to talk about the nature of consciousness. To be clear, I mean consciousness as more than mere experience (which I discussed in relation to the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ here). By consciousness, I mean knowing oneself, experiencing oneself in the world, being awake to things. What is the nature of that?

As a first point, it must involve acting upon and informing oneself. If it did not causally interact or inform with itself, it could have no experience of itself. We can therefore say that consciousness must involve a self-referential causal loop. This loop need not be direct: it may instead involve A acting upon B, and B acting upon A.

Is this sufficient? No. Firstly, for a thing to affect itself is common and trivial. You can create a self-referential causal loop by holding a microphone up to a connected speaker and hearing the reverb, but we wouldn’t call it conscious. Secondly, a thing can be affected by itself without recognising itself as the cause. As an example, a dog might see and chase its own tail without realising it is chasing itself. Truly experiencing oneself requires experiencing oneself as oneself.

As a second point, then, I suggest it involves knowing oneself. What do I mean by ‘knowing’ here? I mean that the information it receives is not left as it is, uninterpreted, but is integrated with other information, and channelled to action. It is practical. The conscious system does not experience itself as arbitrary data, but as something it has a dynamic relationship with, and which it can respond to and interact with, to further its goals. It must experience itself in a way that is meaningful for it, i.e. as information structured to serve its goals. This involves prediction and intentionality, linking experience (past) to appropriate response (present) to achieve a goal (future). (I touched on this aspect of meaning in my post, ‘What It’s Like to Be an AI Snake’).

What It's Like to Be an AI Snake

This ties in with the idea that we developed consciousness after developing our ‘theory of mind’. The idea is that we began with the evolutionary need to model the minds of others, both friends and foes, predators and prey. But these others likewise began modelling us, so that to anticipate their next move, we would need to anticipate them anticipating us.

So then, we know and discover ourselves in relation to the world, through our practical explorations of it. We see how the world responds to us, and how we respond to the world responding to us, and our self-knowledge emerges from this self-revealing/self-creative loop. We find ourselves by going out from ourselves and sharing ourselves with the world.

A third point on the nature of consciousness is that it deals with difficulty, uncertainty and indecision. As Henri Bergson pointed out, consciousness is a “deficit of instinct”. It arises in the gap between stimulus and response. Where the answer is instinctive, obvious, or habitual, consciousness is unnecessary and therefore minimal or absent. We can perform routine tasks like walking, typing, and driving, without paying conscious attention to them. It’s where things go wrong and stand in contrast to our expectations that we are most conscious. Alfred North Whitehead made a similar point when he described consciousness as “the feeling of the contrast of theory, as mere theory, with fact, as mere fact” [PR 286]. It involves the awareness that both our theories and our facts are uncertain, and that we are tasked with making sense of the world we are given.

Simpler organisms are also engaged in predicting the world and forming beliefs. According to the free energy principle, this is practically universal amongst living organisms. But consciousness, at least for us, is more than this, requiring that we experience our beliefs as beliefs, and not simply as reality itself. This is what opens the space for us to question how the world is and imagine how it might be. The great evolutionary leap was realising we don’t know.

This is why we are most conscious when we are (1) surprised and or confused, (2) engaging in creative and or scientific thinking, explicitly exploring the unknown, and (3) experiencing intense gratitude and wonder. These are the points where reality is not taken as something trivial and obvious, but as something bizarre and worthy of attending to. Consciousness is the opposite of taking things for granted.

(Generated using Sora)

This allows us to add some deeper thought to the idea of living “on autopilot” or being an “NPC”. These expressions reflect an intuitive idea that those who live in certain ways are not fully conscious. And with this understanding of consciousness, we see that this intuitive idea is correct. When our lives are predictable, when we don’t question, when we don’t create, when we take no risks, when we live as mere “consumers”, we are not fully conscious. We are sleepwalking. We are zombies.

Consciousness is not just something we have, it is something we do. It is not a magical epiphenomenon of the brain, it is us engaging deeply with life, questioning our beliefs, and daring to imagine new possibilities. It is the rejection of false certainty and the safety that comes with it. It is the Socratic attitude: all I know is that I know nothing. It is the wonder from which all art, all science, and all philosophy begin.

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Ok, what do you think? Is this what consciousness is? Does it go too far or not far enough? Have I overlooked something key? Please let me know what you think in the comments :)