One of the questions that people raise about consciousness, is that of how it is possible to have experience. By experience, here, I mean things like pain, color, smell, etc. These are often discussed as qualia. I don’t find qualia talk to be useful, and perhaps I’ll say why in a future post. But there is still the question of why we experience something, rather than nothing at all. And that’s my topic for this post.
Can a material object have experience?
It would seem strange to say that a chair or a table can have experience. If you think of people as material objects, then you have to wonder how they could have experience.
Personally, I do not think of people as material objects. Rather, I think of them as processes. I’m not made of atoms, because the atoms come and go, while I stay who I am. To me, the question of experience is to be looked at in terms of processes rather than material objects.
Before we look at processes, I should mention panpsychism. That’s the view that everything has a little bit of psychology and a little bit of consciousness. So a panpsychist might believe that atoms have some sort of experience.
I’m ambivalent on panpsychism. I cannot rule it out. But I don’t see that it helps. I suppose the idea would be that human consciousness is somehow built out of the consciousnesses of all of the little parts. But that would seem to imply that when I breath out, and some molecules leave, a little bit of my consciousness goes with them. And when I breath in, I import a little bit of replacement consciousness. It’s hard to see how we could understand human consciousness in that way.
Processes
Take a river such as the Mississippi. All of the water will eventually flow out to sea, while new water from rain and snow melt will replace it. Even though all of the atoms of water have been replaced we will still consider it to be the same river. And if we removed all of the sand from the river banks and replaced it with different sand, we would still consider it the same river.
Clearly what make it the Mississippi river, is not those atoms that can be replaced. It is the flow of water. And that’s a process.
Processes are sometimes defined as molecules in motion.
Without the motions, the flow of water, you would have a lake or a pool, rather than a river. So the motions seem to be an important part of what constitutes the process. In the case of a river, the molecules might be less important. You cannot have molecular motion without molecules. But we can replace all of the molecules with different molecules, and still consider it the same process.
Primitive experience
Imagine a small eddy in a river. I place a canoe paddle in the water to change the flows. And the eddy changes as a result.
The eddy, as process, consists of molecules in motion. And I have changed the motions. Changing the motions constitutes a change in the being of that eddy. So I want to call that a “primitive experience.”
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything conscious about that primitive experience. But if we want to discuss “experience” then we have to start somewhere. And I am starting before consciousness is likely.
Looked at this way, perhaps we should say that a chair has primitive experience if it sags under my weight when I sit on it. But it would not be the chair a material object that has this primitive experience. Rather, it would be the process involving forces that are active as the chair sags. So “primitive experience” is something that I ascribe to some processes, but not to material objects.
Awareness of experience
Suppose now that we have a homeostatic processes. Homeostasis refers to the idea of processes regulating themselves in order to achieve some sort of stability. It is most commonly used in reference to biological processes.
A homeostatic process is monitoring itself. This monitoring is sometimes described in terms of feedback loops. And when that monitoring detects a change in the process, it makes changes elsewhere that seem to keep the process from varying too far from its stable state.
Here we have primitive experience — changes in the process. But we have what might be called a reactive awareness of those changes. The homeostatic process reacts to the changes that it is monitoring, in order to stay close to the stable state.
I’m inclined to say that this still falls short of what we mean by “conscious experience”. But, with reactive awareness, we are getting closer.
Conscious experience
What is missing with reactive awareness, is something like thinking. Once a process has the added ability to think about its own activity and about its reactions to change, then I see that as the beginnings of conscious experience.
As to what we mean by “thinking” — I’ll plan to discuss that in a future post.
The Heretical Philosopher 