It has been pointed out to us that the concepts of "experience" and "consciousness" previously mentioned were a bit hazy. Let's elaborate a bit on them so that the underlying structure may become more apparent. For that we must first clear up what the present mainstream picture is and what its problems are.
So far, we have streered away from the term 'subjective experience' for reasons which will become obvious later, but that is what we refer to when we write 'experience'. The commonly accepted view is that there is a conscious subject which perceives objects and has thereby an experience of them. The subject can be a person or an organism who owns a nervous system. Additionally, neuroscientists have uncovered physical processes happening in the brain which are in a one-to-one correspondence with our subjective experience. Nevertheless, conceptually, there is a difference between the subjective perception and the underlying physiological phenomenon. Take, for example, a given cell in a monkey's cortex and show the monkey various objects. You notice that whenever the monkey is shown a banana, that neuron fires at a high rate. Sometimes it also fires less rapidly when he is shown a yellow elongated shape but clearly the brain cell responds to the perception of a banana. The monkey is subjectively experiencing a banana, but the corresponding physical process is the firing of specific brain cells.
Unfortunately, this is where the present day clear picture ends. From here on now we have a confusing and often conflictuous wilderness of philosophical definitions. Because of this equivalence between two seemingly so different things -- one the stimulation of a gooey cell, the other one the delicious and colorful perception of a banana -- people have introduced the definition of qualia. A qualia is the subjective experience of a physical object, the mental rendering or illustration if you will of an otherwise blunt thing. Things which can perform this rendering are said to be conscious whereas the rest of the stuff has no experience of the world, of any kind.
Within it is deeply rooted the idea of a subject and an object separate from each other. And because of that, one may very well wonder if two people render the same object in the same way. When you and I look at a leaf, do we both render the color green in the same way? This leads us inevitably to picture the universe as a redundant fan of many paralel universes, as many as there are observers, each one coloring the world in its own randomly chosen way. In our view this picture is wrong in two ways.
First, it states there is a one-to-one correspondence between subjective experiences and physical phenomena, but only for stuff that is similar to us. It artificially imposes that the only possible subjective experiences are the ones we humans experience, such as thoughts, emotions and so on. As Pocahontas would put it: "You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you." This human-centered distinction between what is conscious and what isn't then allows people to draw the line wherever pleases them, according to whichever criterium of similarity appeals to them the best, like the presence of a well developed nervous system or the deliciousness of its meat. Some will include all mammals, others all the animals all the way to the oysters, and others will even accept that artificial intelligence may one day become conscious. Confronted with this chaos the most sensible will generally take an agnostic stance, dismissing the question as unanswerable. Yet to them, in their own personal case, that question, of whether they are themselves conscious, is obviously answerable.
In our view the origin of this immense confusion is the distinction between conscious things and unconscious ones. If you remove it everything works again. It means everything has some kind of experience, but that experience varies from system to system. The only constraint is that it be in a one-to-one correspondence with the underlying physical phenomena.
Of course, you might now protest by saying: "What about when I'm asleep? In a deep sleep I'm clearly not conscious." Sure. It kind of is the very definition of being unconscious, lying down still with your eyes closed, asleep or dead. However, is it accurate to say you were unconscious? All you can say is that you have no recollection of anything, that you are unaware of what may or may not have happened during the night, the same way an amnesiac is unaware of what he did previously, even though no one in their right mind would claim he was previously unconscious. This doesn't mean you were thinking about work or humming your favorite song in your head while you were asleep; what went on during the night might have been extremely different from what you experience during the day and it definitely didn't leave any trace you can access. But all you can say is that you awake and you asleep are not mutually conscious.
Which brings us to the second problem we see in the mainstream picture. It assumes there is an observer who perceives and an object which is perceived. This picture is a purely theoretical one and a very wrong one when you look at the system in detail (that's why we didn't want to use the term subjective experience). Yes, the monkey is looking at a banana and experiencing it, but what's really going on is that the atoms on the surface of the banana are interacting with the cone cells on the monkey's retina through light, which then interact with the braincells of the visual cortex through chemical reactions, and so on, and so on. Is there really a distinction between the banana and the monkey? Not in this view. There are changes in the type of interaction that mediates the event of perception but no fundamental change. What you can say is that the cortex of the monkey is aware of the banana, but not that the monkey is aware in general. There is no absolute consciousness, no things that are conscious and things that aren't, there is only relative consciousness, things that are aware of each other and things that aren't. Interaction is consciousness. This doesn't however mean it goes both ways. The visual and motor parts of the brain of the monkey are aware of the banana but the banana isn't aware of the monkey nor is the liver of the monkey aware of the banana, though the ecosystem of bacteria in the fruit might be aware of the ape through the chemicals that emanate from it.
These two principles, formulated by getting rid of any human-centered artificiality, by not thinking in terms of what is conscious and what isn't, have allowed us to ponder about the consciousness of different phenomena without running into self contradictions or infinite loops and at the same time have openened a vast new area of scientific exploration: the study of the mind of physical systems. We will soon address some specific examples and techniques on how to go about doing this.
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