The View from Somewhere: Reframing and Resolving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

How a decentralized metaphysics offers a naturalistic solution to the Hard Problem

Introduction

The hard problem of consciousness is generally presented as the question, “How do physical systems give rise to experience?” Experience is taken as a mysterious property of certain physical systems, particularly brains. Where, then, does this strange property come from?

Importantly, the question concerns “experience” rather than consciousness in the sense of being awake, processing information regarding one’s own state, or any other form of consciousness we might consider in terms of “function”. It is about the “subjective aspect” of being a person/bat/whatever else — the “what it is like to be” that thing.

How can you get from information about an organism’s physiology to an explanation for it having subjective experience? If we assume it has subjective experience, it seems we can use its physiology to provide a good deal of information about what its experience must be like, but we are still no closer to explaining why it has experience. The physiological facts can seemingly explain everything regarding its observable behaviour without implying or requiring any felt experience. It may imply information processing, but why should information processing ever be felt? It looks like there’s an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical facts and consciousness.

Reframing the Hard Problem

We need to reframe the problem. This should be clear from the fact that we still call it the “hard” problem. If a problem seems impossible to solve, even in principle, it’s a good idea to try to take a fresh look at it.

I suggest reframing it as, “Why do some things have a first-person perspective?” To me, this gets at the heart of the question. (Surprisingly, the terms “first person” and “perspective” are not used even once in David Chalmers’ 1995 paper introducing the hard problem.)

The “View from Nowhere”

Now that we have framed the question this way, we can ask ourselves, “What is the alternative?” What is the presumed default, such that first-person perspectives require explanation? The presumed default is a purely objective universe, with no first-person perspectives, only a single third-person, external perspective. This would be a “God’s eye view”, or a “view from nowhere”. It is the sum of all that is, all taken together at once, without any limitations of perspective, interpretation or frame of reference.

But should this be the default? Does it even make sense? What sense can we make of this “view from nowhere”? It cannot be physical or exist within the universe or else it would be relative. Nor can it be a thing, since that would again limit its perspective. Nor can it affect the things within the universe, since it is not a thing. Perhaps we could see it as a “ground of being” - it does not itself affect things, but is the very ground of possibility of their existing at all. Notice how much this sounds like God-talk: a non-physical, non-thing, outside of the universe, having no effect yet being the very “ground of being”.

Do we have any evidence for the “view from nowhere”? We do not, and in fact we cannot. Everything we know comes from some particular perspective. We know facts by our own experience, or by the transmitted experiences of others. We apprehend scientific truths via experiments that exist within a particular context, in relation to the phenomena being studied. They are a view from somewhere, based within an interpretive frame as well as a physical frame of reference. Even mathematical truths are apprehended from within a particular axiomatic reference frame. The view from nowhere is entirely unknowable.¹

Taking another angle, we can consider the view from nowhere as looking at the universe in terms of absolute facts rather than relative facts. Whereas you and I must look at the world as we encounter it in relation to ourselves, objectivity would be the world as it is in absolute terms. It would be seeing things as they are in themselves, not in their interrelations.

The trouble is that absolute facts are meaningless because they lack any reference point. If I say that my laptop is in front of me, I am relating my location, my laptop’s location, and my current orientation. If I say it is at X latitude and Y longitude, I am relating it to the Earth’s equator and the Greenwich Meridian. There are no absolute coordinates, and even if there were, they would be utterly useless until we knew the location of some reference point within those coordinates. Look at any fact you like, and you will find a relation of some kind. Even mathematical facts express relations between different concepts, e.g. “2 is half 4” relates the numbers 2 and 4. If you can think of any meaningful absolute facts, please share them in the comments.

At this point, it may seem I am suggesting we abandon any notion of objective reality, but I assure you I am not. That would be a trivial way to resolve the hard problem, but it would cost more than it gained. Instead, I suggest a more grounded understanding of objectivity: objectivity is the union of multiple perspectives. It is a relational mesh. It is our shared reality. This is all that we require and all that we commonly mean when we speak of reality. We do not need a view from nowhere, we need to triangulate multiple perspectives.

All this means that the view from somewhere, the first-person perspective, is fundamental. We have decentralized and democratized our metaphysics. We no longer have a single “view from nowhere” as our “ground of being”; instead, we are all grounds of being for each other.

What is experience?

So then, what is experience? How does it relate to being? What does the “mesh” really look like?

A thing’s experience/subjectivity is how the world relates to/acts upon it; its being/objectivity is how it relates to/acts upon the rest of the world. Its experience is the world flowing in; its being is its self flowing out. This fits with our general experience of experience as being “the world as we receive it”. It is the world as it is given.

Obj. “Ok, but if experience simply is incoming causation, how can there be causal influences that are not felt? For example, I might be scratched on a tree while running and only notice when I see the blood later. Shouldn’t this be impossible?”

Ans. It is correct that all causation must be felt. However, that causation and that feeling need not be transmitted to the entire organism. The skin that is scratched will experience it, but this causation and experience is not necessarily passed on to the brain, and if it is passed to the brain is not necessarily passed to the entirety of it, and so whatever part is “you” may be entirely unaware of the scratch.

To illustrate this, we could represent the universe as a directed graph with each edge indicating the flow of causality. Then, for any node in the graph, its incoming edges would represent its experience/subjectivity, while its outgoing edges would represent its being/objectivity. Crucially, one node’s incoming edge is always another’s outgoing edge, and vice versa: objectivity and subjectivity, experience and being, are the same thing from different perspectives.

A directed graph representing the causal flow of the universe. For each node, its incoming edges are its subjective experience, while its outgoing edges are its objective being.

I think this graph is a helpful illustration, but it is important to keep in mind that our top-down perspective on the graph is not the ultimate truth of the graph. We might imagine ourselves as relating to the graph as if we had a God’s-eye view, but this would be a mistake. In fact, our experience of the graph is a result of causal influence reaching out from the graph to us. We view the graph from somewhere, not nowhere. Even God, if he/she exists, would have to view reality from his/her divine perspective, not from nowhere.

At this point I think it is fair to say the hard problem of consciousness is no longer a problem for us. We have a simple account of what experience is and how it relates to physical reality, without adding any extra ingredients or mysterious properties. Experience is revealed to be equivalent to causality itself. The hard problem is the result of an unfounded background assumption of the “view from nowhere” as the ultimate truth. But actually, consciousness reveals that reality is metaphysically decentralized. Just as there is no centre of the universe, no ether, no ultimate frame of reference, there is also no “view from nowhere”, no “thing in itself”.

I must note, however, that this tells us little to nothing about consciousness in the sense of self-awareness, wakefulness, higher-order thinking, etc. But these “easy” problems remain open to the relatively normal investigative tools of modern brain science, and there is a lot of good work being done in this area already. My proposal only concerns “raw experience” of the sort that may be entirely unself-aware and unthinking.

Placing this in context

Panpsychism/Physicalism

This is a form of panpsychism since it entails everything having a first-person perspective on the universe, constituted by the way the universe acts upon it. Everything that exists is a perspective on the entire universe. This is very much in agreement with the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead, who I am currently reading. It differs from some other forms of panpsychism however, in that experience is not being posited as a separate “subjective aspect” of objective reality, without any causal influence. It is not something added to objective reality. In this sense, it might also be taken as a physicalist position.

Alfred North Whitehead

In fact, the whole picture is very much in line with Whitehead’s notion of actual entities having experience in the form of their “prehensions”/“feelings”, which he defined as their “concrete facts of relatedness”. He also saw actual entities as being “objectified” to one another in their outgoing relations. Whitehead’s system is far more developed and nuanced than my proposal, but I don’t see any clash between what I have proposed and his views. He even acknowledges that his “God” only has a limited and particular perspective, like every other actual entity.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism

The proposal ties in to perspectivism too, an idea I came across from Nietzsche. My rejection of the view from nowhere follows his, as outlined in the link. I am not aware of him ever linking this to the hard problem of consciousness (of course, that phrase was not even coined until Chalmers’ 1995 paper).

Ontic Structural Realism

It also aligns with ontic structural realism, which is the idea that all reality is nothing but structures of relations, without any independent relata. Under OSR, reality is how things relate to one another and nothing more. It similarly rejects the notion of the “thing in itself”, considered separately from its relations. Under my proposal, experience is likewise how things relate to one another and nothing more.

Mind/Brain Identity Theory

It can also be understood as a form of mind/brain identity theory, since the mental experiences are identical to the physical processes within the brain. This seems odd for a panpsychist theory, but here we are!

Epiphenomenalism

It stands in direct opposition to epiphenomenalism, which is ‘the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.’ Indeed, I have argued that experience is physical causality. This point is important because I think epiphenomenalism would rob life of all meaning, divorcing the experiencer from the agent being experienced. One would have experience but no agency, while the other has agency but no experience. It is, in my opinion, a horrific notion.

Dualism

It also rejects any kind of substance dualism, instead providing a monist vision. It might be viewed as a form of property dualism, but I think “property” is the wrong way of framing it. It suggests an underlying substance that possesses its subjectivity and objectivity as properties, which I reject. It does share with property dualism, however, that both are monist and see objective and subjective as different ways of perceiving the same reality.

Information & Experience

We can also tie the idea of experience as causality in with the idea of experience as information, since causality is always a transmission of information. I need to thank

Mike Smith

at SelfAwarePatterns.com for suggesting that information is causality. For example, when we look at an electrical circuit connected to a light bulb, we can see it as a flow of electrons, or energy, or information — the light informs us of the state of the switch, because of the causal connection. Wherever there is causation, there is information flow. The idea of experience being linked to information seems to be something that many different views on consciousness tend to agree on, from panpsychists to illusionists and everyone in between.

With this link between causation, information, and experience, we might link up this proposal with ideas such as the Free Energy Principle and Universal Darwinism. Precursors to this can already be found in the work of Alfred North Whitehead.

Concluding Remarks

This simple but radical idea provides an entirely naturalistic solution to the hard problem of consciousness, locating experience firmly within the normal causal operations of the world without introducing any extra ingredients. The only “cost” is abandoning the primacy of the absolutist “view from nowhere”, which is undesirable for other reasons and serves little function. In decentralizing our metaphysics, it also offers a metaphysical complement to modern relativistic cosmology. It also harmonizes the main insights of multiple major views in the philosophy of mind today, while avoiding the danger of epiphenomenalism. In short, we get to have our cake and eat it too!

I should note that this remains a very incomplete account of consciousness and experience. It leaves open (for now) questions such as how higher forms of consciousness arise, and how selves are unified across space and time. Hopefully, I will deal with these more fully in later posts.

What do you think?

There are in all likelihood a thousand aspects of this that I have overlooked, so I would love to hear what you think in the comments. Am I onto something? Have I made a fatal blunder? Have I overlooked a bigger problem with my solution? Am I contradicting myself? Please let me know, whatever you think :)

1. I believe this is a point Kant recognised about us existing in ignorance of the noumena, or “things-in-themselves”, although he argued they must exist despite that. But I haven’t read Kant, so I won’t comment further.