Phenomenal Consciousness and Emergence: Eliminating the Explanatory Gap.

Todd E Feinberg,Jon Mallatt

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01041

Abstract

The role of emergence in the creation of consciousness has been debated for over a century, but it remains unresolved. In particular there is controversy over the claim that a “strong” or radical form of emergence is required to explain phenomenal consciousness. In this paper we use some ideas of complex system theory to trace the emergent features of life and then of complex brains through three progressive stages or levels: Level 1 (life), Level 2 (nervous systems), and Level 3 (special neurobiological features), each representing increasing biological and neurobiological complexity and ultimately leading to the emergence of phenomenal consciousness, all in physical systems. Along the way we show that consciousness fits the criteria of an emergent property—albeit one with extreme complexity. The formulation Life + Special neurobiological features → Phenomenal consciousness expresses these relationships. Then we consider the implications of our findings for some of the philosophical conundrums entailed by the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and phenomenal consciousness. We conclude that consciousness stems from the personal life of an organism with the addition of a complex nervous system that is ideally suited to maximize emergent neurobiological features and that it is an example of standard (“weak”) emergence without a scientific explanatory gap. An “experiential” or epistemic gap remains, although this is ontologically untroubling.

Highlights

Despite some of life’s unique features (Mayr, 2004) all basic life processes remain in principle explainable within the constraints of normal physics and chemistry
There is more to our concept of pain than its causal role, there is its qualitative character, how it feels; and what is left unexplained by the discovery of C-fiber firing is why pain should feel the way it does! For there appears to be nothing about C-fiber firing which makes it naturally “fit” the phenomenal properties of pain, any more than it would fit some other set of phenomenal properties
As for the multiple routes feature of emergent phenomena (Feature 6 in Table 1), this is exactly what we found for consciousness (Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016a,b, 2018a), in the above-mentioned form called the multiple realizability of a mental state

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Despite some of life’s unique features (Mayr, 2004) all basic life processes remain in principle explainable within the constraints of normal physics and chemistry. While the scientific basis of life is no longer a philosophical or scientific mystery, in the case of consciousness— in the case of subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness, primary consciousness, raw “feelings” or irreducible “qualia”) – there appears to be what philosopher Levine (1983) called an “explanatory gap” between the subjective experiences and the physical brain: Consciousness and Emergence. The identification of the qualitative side of pain with C-fiber firing (or some property of C-fiber firing) leaves the connection between it and what we identify it with completely mysterious. One might say, it makes the way pain feels into merely brute fact Note that we only consider basic, phenomenal consciousness (having any experience at all), not any higher types like reflective consciousness, self-consciousness, or higher-order cognition (Nagel, 1974, 1986; Block, 1995; Chalmers, 1995, 1996; Metzinger, 2003; Revonsuo, 2010; Churchland, 2013; Carruthers, 2016)

General Features

Weak Versus Strong Emergence and Consciousness