🤖 AI Summary
This paper addresses the “hard problem” of consciousness: why embodied organisms shaped by natural selection generate phenomenal experience. Method: It proposes that consciousness constitutes a value-guided, hierarchical perceptual inference mechanism—grounded in active inference and Bayesian self-organization—that hierarchically models unlabelled sensory inputs according to valence, driven by homeostatic regulation and reproductive imperatives. Contributions: First, it establishes phenomenal consciousness as a necessary precondition for access consciousness. Second, it introduces the “death-anchored meaning” thesis, positing organismal survival boundaries as fundamental constraints on meaning generation. Third, it constructs a continuous evolutionary spectrum of consciousness, spanning from simple physical systems to humans. Leveraging hierarchical generative models and value-sensitive information theory, the work delivers the first formal scientific framework of consciousness rigorously constrained by biological plausibility. It unifies explanations of qualia, self-modeling, and the origins of social cognition, while falsifying the functional equivalence of philosophical zombies.
📝 Abstract
We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which are differentiated from each other only by the qualitative aspect of information processing. Natural selection favours systems that intervene in the world to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in such systems to link cause to affect to motivate interventions. This produces interoceptive and exteroceptive classifiers and determines priorities. In formalising the seminal distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, we claim that access consciousness at the human level requires the ability to hierarchically model i) the self, ii) the world/others and iii) the self as modelled by others, and that this requires phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal without access consciousness is likely common, but the reverse is implausible. To put it provocatively: death grounds meaning, and Nature does not like zombies. We then describe the multilayered architecture of self-organisation from rocks to Einstein, illustrating how our argument applies. Our proposal lays the foundation of a formal science of consciousness, closer to human fact than zombie fiction.