| الوصف: |
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. |