On the primary nature of consciousness

Michel Bitbol
CNRS / Ecole Normale Suprieure (Archives Husserl), Paris
Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi, The Systems View of Life, Cambridge University
Press, 2014, p. 266-268

Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the
awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of
ones own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about
pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere feel of sensing and being, irrespective
of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure
experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary
feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.
We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgensteins
expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects,
or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience.
In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary.
Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes ones own experience and the otherss
experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are
characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with
conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology
and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, or
elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science.
Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific
statement : it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.
But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the
pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view
of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any
sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that
they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully
put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the
chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate
behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this
organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of having a
feel). In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to
appear as irrelevant or incidental.
As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by
way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any
deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful
methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or
integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major
features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of
awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent
predictors of subjects behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of provide reports in
clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no
clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the functions of
consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like to be an organism
performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select
some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the
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organism, integrated action planning, or self-monitoring), but not the mere fact that there is
something it is like to implement these functions. Indeed, only the functions have adaptative
value, not their being experienced.
Even the ability of neurophysiological inquiry to identify correlates of phenomenal
consciousness can be challenged on that basis. After all, identifying such correlates rely
heavily on the subjects ability to discriminate, to memorize, and to report, which is used as
the ultimate experimental criterion of consciousness. Can we preclude the possibility that the
large-scale synchronization of complex neural activity of the brain cortex often deemed
indispensible for consciousness, is in fact only required for interconnecting a number of
cognitive functions including those needed for memorizing, self-reflecting and reporting ?
Conversely, extrapolating Semir Zekis suggestion, can we preclude that any (large or small)
area of the brain or even of the body is associated to some sort of fleeting pure experience,
although no report can be obtained from it?
Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of
anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are
lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain,
but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their
ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to
react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose
ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory ; but they still have
implicit memories of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together
as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure,
instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This
looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness.
Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there
exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly
contradict our initial aknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure
experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very
blindspot of science : the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only
a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue.
Should we content ourselves with these negative remarks ? As Francisco Varela has
shown, one can overcome them by proposing a broadened definition of science. Instead of
remaining stuck within the third-person attitude, the new science should include a dance of
mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts, mediated by
the second person level of social exchange. As soon as this momentous turn is taken,
elementary consciousness is no longer a mystery for a truncated science, but an aknowledged
datum from which a fuller kind of science can unfold.
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