A Novel Subject-Object Model of Consciousness

Abstract

The nature of the subjective aspect of consciousness is elusive and hence, there has been a lot of debate on how to quantify the subjective experience of a human in comparison to other living systems. Here, the primary concern lies with the question of the presence of consciousness in other living systems, and if so, how distinct could the experience be when compared to humans. Firstly, to probe such investigations, our current theories fall short in having an absolute definition for consciousness and whatever we observe and experience as a human brings about our present notion/definition. Failures in capturing the non-deterministic nature of living/biological entities with our reductionist and deterministic models call for a new holistic science and synergistic theories of consciousness. In this regard, present paper tries to propose a novel consciousness model; Subject-Object Model (SOM), based on the degree of subjectivity/subjectiveness a living species would naturally embrace. It propounds consciousness as a kind of evolutionary trait and thereon claims it as an emergent property resulting from the parsimony of indexing quantities. Accordingly, it conjectures; the development of certain degree and level of complexity in a living system during the process of evolution calls for an emergence of a qualitative property (like consciousness) for better survival and optimal functioning. This provides a scale to estimate the level of consciousness and the extent of subjective experience of life across the wide living spectra.