From Cognition to Consciousness

Do we really run into a hard problem once we know what consciousness is? In this essay we approach that question from the bottom up. We begin with the evolutionary history of cognition, from basic reflexes through learning and generalisation. Then we isolate consciousness from the rest of cognition: intelligence, attention, behaviour, and the contents of experience. Once those distinctions are in place, we discover the purpose of consciousness. We use that to surmise that the brain must continuously compute a representation relevant to the creature’s current circumstance. Our findings then reveal the contours of phenomenology. The proposal is that phenomenology is what it is like to be a specific type of process, expressly structured as a first-person perspective. If that is right, consciousness is neither uniquely human, nor is phenomenology a mysterious addition to reality. Consciousness is an architectural consequence of a particular kind of cognition — one that evolution arrived at by fitting animals ever more closely to their world. Whether this is enough to retire the hard problem is the question the rest of the essay sets out to answer.