Forget Qualia — The Useful Aspect of Consciousness is Self-Awareness
By: Jim Mason
Tags: Philosophy, Humanity, Politica, Self-awareness, Consciousness

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Many thinkers and writers about consciousness seem to be preoccupied with what they call “the hard problem of consciousness”. For details about that, Wikipedia is a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

To me that “problem” seems perhaps interesting but ultimately pointless and unsolvable. It’s comparable to the simple question “Why am I me, rather than someone else?” As some people answer that question, with a smile, “Somebody had to be you, so who better than you?”

I think the more useful question about consciousness has to do with self-awareness: To what extent are various systems self-aware, and how does that benefit them? And in particular, to what extent are we humans, and other living things, self-aware, and how does that benefit us?

As I have discussed in another essay (“The Universality of Life and Death”), active systems, including ones that we call “living” ones, range from tightly-coupled organisms like our individual human selves and other individual animals and plants, to loosely-coupled supra-organisms like flocks and herds of animals, fields and forests of plants, and human groups and societies.

Tightly-coupled living systems operate as units localized in space and time and depend on one or more critical components for their overall survival. Loosely-coupled living systems consist of many similar components and can generally survive the loss of a fairly high percentage of those components or can even split into two or more smaller loosely-coupled systems of the same kind.

So what does it mean for a system to be “self-aware”, and how can that benefit it?

Beyond the idea of self-awareness as “the feeling of what it is to be” something — the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” — the more useful, important idea of self-awareness is a structure or process within the larger system that provides the system with a model of its own structure and behavior that is useful to the system in predicting, guiding, and controlling its overall behavior.

Self-awareness of that kind never is, and needn’t be, total. The system’s model of itself is necessarily only a part of itself, and it only needs to be accurate enough for the system to operate more successfully with such an internal model than without one.

As we grow from infancy, our individual human brains develop more or less accurate models of ourselves — ideas about ourselves and our place in our environment — just as we develop ideas about other people. We think we know our own capabilities, our strengths and weaknesses, but we often surprise ourselves either by foolishness and errors that we exhibit or by accomplishments that we did not think we were capable of. If we are lucky, we learn to adjust our models of ourselves as we grow and as our bodies continue to change and age, so that our self-awareness improves and helps us to operate more successfully in our environments.

Of course an alternative way for the overall behavior of an organism or supra-organism to be controlled is for it to be so constrained by its environment or by an outside agent that it has little scope for choice in its actions. That’s the situation for young children and slaves. And some people believe that’s the situation for most adults as well — either that we are best off being subjects of strong, dictatorial leaders, or that we are ultimately subject to the control of an external God or gods. In that case we may individually adopt ideas of self-awareness that incorporate submission to an external authority, and those ideas may affect our overall behavior correspondingly.

As a human species, and as human organizations of various scales, from families to local communities, to societies and beyond, it is not clear that we have yet developed systems of self-awareness which are useful enough in controlling the overall behaviors of our human supra-organisms. So far, whatever self-awareness mechanisms that exist for such systems operate mainly within the belief systems of the individual people who make up the groups, and they help the overall group operate cohesively only to the extent that the people involved agree in their beliefs about the group. Often the individual people come to disagree over their beliefs about the group, to the detriment of the overall group.

Systems of widespread communication can work to synchronize the belief systems of many individual people so that they work together cooperatively, but the same systems can also spread conflicting beliefs that cause people belonging to different human supra-organisms to compete and conflict. Various kinds of voting systems are used to take important decisions out of the control of individual people and put them into the control of groups of people. But surveillance, external control, and enforcement systems of various kinds can constrain the behavior of individual people to force them to work together in ways that may be counter to their individual belief systems.

So it seems there is some chance that we humans will develop stable, planet-wide self-awareness systems that will successfully guide our future behavior in a coordinated way, though whether those systems will be democratic, oligarchic, or tyrannical is hard to predict. History seems to teach us that individual tyrannies don’t long outlast the lives of the tyrants, but oligarchies often seem to have more stability than democracies do.

The question about the long-term survival of our species comes down to whether we can achieve a stable, useful species-level system of self-awareness that can successfully guide our future behavior in a coordinated way, or whether (as seems more likely now), like most loosely-coupled living systems when faced with difficulties, we will continue to divide and fragment into competing sub-groups that threaten one another’s existence and ultimately the existence of our species as a whole.

And then there are the ultimate philosophical and religious questions that many people ask: Is the universe self-aware? Is its behavior subject to the control of an external authority? To me those are, like the “hard problem of consciousness”, ultimately unanswerable and fruitless questions, much less important pursuits than the task of building useful models of human self-awareness. Still, I think it is possible to make some conjectures about those questions.

Considering what we know of the vastness of the universe and the limit of the speed of light on interactions between its parts, it seems clear that whatever self-awareness mechanisms the universe may have that could control its overall behavior must operate on a much slower time scale than the time scales of our individual human lives and even of our species as a whole. Similarly, the possibility that there is some external authority or agent that controls the overall behavior of the universe seems so far from our human capability to determine that it must remain forever a matter of sheer speculation.