Solving the Consciousness Problem
Partly
When picking apples with his friends, the polymath and Nobel Laureate, Herbert Simon, discovered he was colour blind.
He couldn’t distinguish the red from the green apples.
When black, white, and shades of grey have been your staple view since you were young, there is no issue until you’re asked to tell the odd one out colour in a test.
The commonest colour blindness is red-green. But how is that related to consciousness?
While observing a red object, your redness is different from my redness. As implicitly apparent as it may sound, we may lack a way to describe this difference. It cannot be measured. And thus, we cannot subject the experience to a scientific test.
Some would argue that as a result, the analysis falls outside the scientific domain.
Yet, it is scientific tests that have led to such a conclusion.
Today, fMRI scans match our sense experiences and with the flow of blood inside our brains. The level of detail we currently have about brain function outmatches the scientific strides made over a century ago.
Yet, we are nowhere close to understanding the hard problem of consciousness.
I could also argue that we don’t know if we can explain the easy problem.
The easy problem is tasked with explaining all the events captured in a scan as the brain does its swooshing of blood, and nerves get preferentially excited. It explains the cause-and-effect link between the start and finish of an organism’s experience.
Consider a worm such as C. elegans. It has 302 neurons. We can match every signal from the start to the end. It gives the impression that the easy problem of consciousness is easy.
I was once convinced that the easy problem is easy because the details in the causal chain link was all that was needed, but I have now grown a little skeptical. And I haven’t started discussing the hard problem of consciousness.
The problems with consciousness
The easy problem works with the mechanism of causal links.
It assumes the reductionist approach in science, where the bottom levels trigger the upper levels. The same perspective argues we can never know or understand a scientific mechanism unless we strip the components down to their fundamental particles.
This may look pleasing, but it is not consistent with empirical evidence. While stripping components and disengaging the network relationships is possible, building it all back, piece by piece, becomes an issue.
It can be bypassed by sticking to the clinical ways of handling data,  from the top down. That is, downward causality. If blood flows to this region of the brain, then certain behaviours should be expected.
But this, too, falls into the trap where different regions of the brain are assumed to perform various functions. This container model is the basis for grandmother neurons, which, as far as we know, don’t exist. A grandmother neuron is the basic neuron responsible for different bodily actions or responds to a specific complex stimulus.
Empirical evidence shows that the brain functions in networks, multimodally and in a versatile fashion. If a region stops receiving blood supply, another part might take over to compensate for the dead space.
Furthermore, a single region can serve several functions, and several regions can serve a single function. Thus, the easy problem of consciousness is only soluble in principle. However, empirical evidence shows that it might be difficult in practice.
Practical evidence is also what is used to define the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem is the basis of your redness being different from mine, the disparate sense experience.
You may be massaged in a single spot on the head, but the effect is different for different people. You could even pick identical twins and still have different results.
The idea of stripping a mechanism down to its fundamental components bears little relevance in explaining experiential patterns of organisms. We can watch the same movie, but I can enjoy it while another person hates it. Same visual cue, different outcomes.
The different solutions to such problems run from monist responses, where everything is assumed to be a part of the universal consciousness, to a Cartesian divide between the brain and the mind.
Bertrand Russell recalls how these problems used to be dismissed when he was young:
About the brain, never mind. About the mind, doesn’t matter.
But it cannot be dismissed if it is a problem that has sprung from the same tests that fall within the realm of science.
Furthermore, nobody knows where the ‘I’ comes from. You would introduce yourself as ‘I am the mother of four children’, but the origin of the ‘I’ remains mysterious.
Nobody knows where this personal reference comes from.
However, I have a theory that could partly solve these problems.
Bypassing these problems
Organismal Selection is a theory of evolution that focuses on the organism.
Most theories on evolution work with genes. Prions, which lack nucleic acid (a core component of DNA/RNA), also evolve, despite lacking a gene.
The essential argument is that organisms can be described in a spectrum, a probability spectrum. The far left of this spectrum is non-annihilation. It stands at 0. The extreme right is annihilation. It stands at 1.
Between 0 and 1 lie the probabilities. Also, between 0 and 1 is an infinite number of probabilities. Thus, all organisms can be described within this spectrum.
Since all organisms exist, they can take on whatever probability. The probability then becomes that organism’s probability of annihilation.
The probability of annihilation is never static. It is always progressing towards certain annihilation. Thus, with such a progression, organisms would easily postpone their annihilation by seeking mergers.
If your probability of annihilation is ½ and mine is ½, if we seek a merger, then it becomes ¼. That is ½ and ½, which becomes ¼. In probability, the ‘and’ function denotes multiplication.
After merging, a new organism emerges. This comprises the original constituent organisms and the combination of mergers they form. Thus, their probability shifts back in the annihilation spectrum.
Organisms, therefore, seek mergers to avoid annihilation.
Using the same example, an annihilation probability of ¼ is the same as a probability of not being annihilated of ¾. That is 1–¼. This gives us the drive we see in organisms,  which is, avoiding annihilation.
An organism can therefore be described as:
A physical entity and its tendency to avoid annihilation.
The emergence of the organism is denoted by the new probability, in this case, ¼.
But even more surprising is that the tendency to avoid annihilation is also new. Since these probabilities are singular, this is where the ‘I’ emerges. This is represented by the ¾ probability (1–¼). That is one explanation from the theory of Organismal Selection.
Also, the probability of avoiding annihilation, what I call the tendency to avoid annihilation, also stems from the same probability. This is where I believe consciousness emerges. The 1 minus an organism’s probability of annihilation forms the basis for the origin of consciousness.
Now, since these probabilities are not static, they always change. That is also the case with our degree of consciousness. It is ever shifting.
Since organisms can be denoted by unique probabilities from the infinite possibilities of probabilities between 0 and 1, then each organism can have a unique origin of consciousness. Thus, your experience will be different from mine.
Therefore, the theory of Organismal Selection can explain the basis of quale. Qualia (singular, quale) is the reason behind your redness being different from mine. It is the hard problem of consciousness.
The hard problem is therefore solved in part by the theory of Organisational Selection. I don’t know if we can determine if the problem has been solved in totality. So it’s safer to say that the problem has been partly solved.
This solution implies that all you need is physical existence to have consciousness emerge. What you also need is a credible imminent threat for it to manifest.
Usually, when deep into a problem, one tends to forget oneself. But if stirred by someone and asked who you are, you quickly respond: I am Marcus Aurelius.
This response is due to a threat. Someone assumes you don’t exist, and so you respond to affirm your existence. You start with the pronoun ‘I’, which represents the experiences of the collection of mergers and physical entities constituting your body.
It is further supported by patients who experience hemi-neglect. Because of the severance of a core part of the hemisphere of the brain, one side of the body does not detect the existence of the other. This implies that the role of one does not serve the other, even if it does from other physiological functions.
Such individuals only acknowledge one side of the body and not the other. Remember that an emergent organism is formed from the merger it has created. Strokes or surgeries can sever crucial mergers.
Notice that the use of probability means that any organism has a baseline form of consciousness. We don’t have to have a brain for it to manifest. This is the other explanation drawn from the theory of Organismal Selection. It’s a clever way of bypassing the need to evolve past a certain degree of complexity before consciousness emerges.
This is best seen when an organism asserts its existence in the presence of a credible form of imminent threat. That action, fighting or flying, or any form of activity to avoid annihilation, is the baseline form of consciousness.
Furthermore, I can add some extra evidence as a critical care doctor. When a patient is about to die, their probability of annihilation is closer to one. It could, for instance, be at 999/1000. This would mean that their tendency to avoid annihilation is 1/000. And indeed, this is how patients who are on the brink of dying turn out to be.
There is always a window where a team could resuscitate and bring the patient back to life. This is often done through the creation of other mergers. The team on the ground administers various forms of medication or shock waves to stir the patient back to life. All these are efforts to create stable mergers, but sometimes they fail. A stable merger requires participation from all parties.
All these explanations stem from a single theory of evolution, which I never thought could amount to much.
What I’m trying to say is…
The theory of Organismal Selection has enormous explanatory power.
Since it focuses on organisms, it can explain some of the problems we have always known about our experiences. In particular, it can partly solve the hard problem of consciousness using a clever trick sparked from the argument of the theory of Organismal Selection.
It can also be used to explain the conundrum behind the self to the ‘I’. The organization is the reason behind the self. Self-organization now takes on a new different meaning when viewed from the basis of Organismal Selection.
The self and the body almost take us into the Cartesian split, but cleverly through the mathematical rules of probability.
Who would have thought?
This song inspired some of the words used in this article. Source - YouTube