What is consciousness? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers and theologians since antiquity, and more recently, psychologists and neuroscientists. It clearly exists: we are confronted with its reality from waking to sleep, and often in an altered form even when sleeping. The advent of contemporary neuroscience has made some major inroads, by identifying a vast array of what it calls “correlates of consciousness”: neural activity and processes that coexist with conscious phenomena. But it still remains something of an enigma, particulary as regards the first-person experience of consciousness as such. If we view the brain as a machine, say akin to a computer program, why is this machine conscious, whereas the program (presumably) is not?

I believe I have the answer. Not a theory; not an answer; the answer.

Before we get to my account, a quick note on this paper, and my credentials. This is not an academic work; it is a scientifically informed, popularly accessible work of philosophy, more particulary, philosophy of mind. It is based on my decades-long fixation on these problems, and scientifically informed by the 5+ years I spent working and studying full time in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience lab of Professor Randy O’Reilly (now at UC Davis) in the Psychology and Neuroscience department of the University of Colorado, Boulder. There are only a few citations, because as we will see, that although this explanation depends on a wide array of neuroscience discoveries made in the last decades, it doesn’t depend on any particular one. Likewise, my explanations do not depend on any other explanations of which I’m aware, and the plethora of “theories of consciousness” extant in psychology and philosophy of mind (as evidenced by a simple AI search for same) suggests no one has yet created a theory that has obtained broad agreement. (And as we progress, I’ll show why this is likely the case…)

The vast majority of philosophy does not require science—it is a foundation for all other intellectual disciplines, and an intellectual error to claim science is necessary. This includes Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and Esthetics (the study of art.) But there is one subdiscipline of philosophy that absolutely does need to be informed by science, and that is Philosophy of Mind. And in fact the relevant disciplines of science also need to be reciprocally informed by philosophy. I express this in what I call the Transrelational Postulate, which states:

It is impossible to understand how consciousness works,
without understanding how the brain works;
AND
it is impossible to understand how the brain works,
without reference to the phenomenology of consciousness.

Prior to the advent of contemporary neuroscience, it would be literally impossible to conceive how consciousness works, and any musings on it would be completely speculative, and barely, if at all, subject to empirical verification. And it turns out that consciousness can only be satisfactorily explained by reference to facts about neural operations in the brain elucidated by contemporary neuroscience. Likewise, it will be impossible to fully understand how the brain works, without the recognition that its architecture and operation have as their teleology (their end) the erection and maintenance of phenomenological consciousness.

The context of knowledge I am assuming (and largely using) for this paper can be expressed in two excellent books:

Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience, by Randy O’Reilly, Yuko Munakata, and others; version 5 (circa 2025.)
(Note, the first printed edition is still available on Amazon and elsewhere, but is completely out of date.) The latest version, is available free in several digital forms online from here: https://compcogneuro.org/

This book is fantastic on many fronts. It starts with chapters that explain the building blocks of the brain: neurons; highly delimited areas of neurons, devoted to a specific processing step; tracts of axons that communicate output signalling of neurons both within an area and to other areas; inhibitory processes that force neural competition; and ubiquitous bi-directional connectivity. All the chapters include references to neural simulations you the reader can (and are encouraged to) run to help elucidate what was covered. Later chapters focus on specific elements of consciousness, such as perception, language (in humans), action selection, and so forth. The most significant aspect of this book, and its companion models, is the decisions O’Reilly et al. have made regarding what aspects of neurons, neural ensembles, and connectivity are core to how the brain works, and which parts (at least in their view, based on their examination of the research) are not needed. For example, actual neurons are incredibly complex, but in focusing on what they do information-wise, are relatively simple (a neuron behaves electrically like a capacitor, that gets repeatedly charged up, then discharged suddenly.) The fact that a wide array of their models are able to reliably reproduce relevant experimental and observational results, compared to brains, helps support their view of having a “Goldilocks” modeling system.

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers, Oxford University Press, 1997. (Available on Amazon.)

Although this book is a bit older now, that doesn’t diminish its value. David Chalmers introduces the “problem” of consciousness, and explains in highly readable prose how this has been dealt with by various schools and some influential scholars. Chalmers goes on to present his own theory, with which I disagree, but it doesn’t diminish the excellent, objective exposition he provides of the main schools of thought on the topic.

Consciousness

So. Consciousness. Let’s spend some time talking about the characteristics of what I am purporting to explain. Let’s start by examining a crucial metaphysical quality of consciousness that I think helps explain how explanations of it so often go awry. (“Metaphysical” in this context means “considered in the widest sense”.)

The purpose of consciousness in any animal, is moving the animal around in reality in pursuit or defense of its basic values. For example, finding and consuming food and water; defending territory from predators, seeking a mate, and so forth. Now consider what animals (and we) encounter in reality, i.e. that which we all are overwhelmingly aware. Reality is composed of things, entities, like rocks, trees, animals, people, and so on. Consciousness for us animals, is overwhelmingly consciousness of things, and their attributes and actions. A black cat, running. A red car being driven. Our own body. The food and drink we consume. Admittedly, humans are often concerned with language and thought, which aren’t exactly things. But even then, we tend to conceive of our words as somewhat “abstract things”, and we consider printed words as thing-like units. It’s probably no accident we introduce children to letters and numbers by embossing them on blocks (things.) But in terms of our perception of the world and our body, it is all things.

So it seems to me (this is just a hypothesis, not critical to my explanation later) that because the world presents overwhelmingly as a collection of things, when considering what consciousness is, the most natural psychological tendency is to conceive it as some kind of physical thing (special particles; energy field; “stuff” in another dimension etc.) So I suggest that the natural (default) psychological metaphysics of consciousness is, “It is some kind of thing.”

The best example of this type of thinking is the religious/mystic concept of a “soul”: a fully existent encapsulation of the entirety of the consciousness of a person, that exists in some “higher” dimension. Most believers of this construct believe it survives death, and travels to a new place, such as “heaven” or “hell”; some even believe it can come back and be incorporated in a new body.

In technical terms, all such conceptions of consciousness are termed dualist, meaning the idea that consciousness is something apart from, but also connected to the body. (We will see though that dualist theories suffer from a fatal flaw, which we will examine presently.)

There are a variety of other general categories of theories of consciousness, a number of which I consider too preposterous to even attempt to refute. A particularly preposterous, but sadly too popular theory, currently taught in social science departments, is the idea that consciousness is metaphysically primary, i.e. exists apart from reality, and that this consciousness then creates physical reality. Another preposterous “theory” is solipsism: the notion that (for some reason) the only consciousness that exists is of the one doing the pondering.

More “scientific” theories, that gain purchase or at least a polite audience in psychology and neuroscience, seem to try to find consciousness residing in things relating to neurons, such as a certain category of synapse. There is a theory called epiphenomenalism, which says that consciousness is some kind of “add-on” to the brain; it is what gives rise to our experience, but is itself not causal of action. Physicists are also known to stomp around in this area, claiming that some kind of quantum phenomena, such as a quantum field (whatever that is) is where consciousness resides.

Another flavor of theories, which quite puzzle me, are ones that try to focus on consciousness deriving from specific types of thinking, such as Rosenthal’s “meta-thoughts about mental states” or Baar’s “global workspace theory.” It is clear, at least to me, that animals are just as conscious as humans, so trying to explain consciousness by reference to a faculty only possessed by humans is a non-starter.

Since this is not an academic paper, I am not going to spend much more time on existing theories of consciousness; I refer the reader to David Chalmers’ book, or do an AI query requesting theories grouped by predominant school of thought.

Let us turn to a brief review of what it is we are trying to explain: consciousness. Of course I needn’t explain it to the reader, since everyone has it. But it bears some elucidation, to point out things that may not necessarily be obvious. The study of consciousness from the aspect of how it appears to us is called phenomenology, a subbranch of philosophy of mind. (Note: phenomenology does not require any particular level of scientific development or knowledge, unlike theory of mind.)

Consciousness enables us to be in direct contact with external reality, and interally our body, and facilities in our mind itself, by way of the evidence provided to us by the senses, and internal senses. With almost no effort on our part, physical reality is in some sense mirrored within us, for our examination. The various entities that exist around us are presented effortlessly as percepts. By moving our body, head, and eyes, we can constantly refresh this panorama. The fidelity of our perception to reality is really quite astonishing, with only the occasional mis-identification (eg of something afar) or artificial illusions to demonstrate it is not somehow identical to reality, but is mediated by our senses and whatever it is inside us that is consciousness (leaving this purposefully unspecified for the moment.)

Consciousness most importantly enables us to evaluate the things in the reality around us, to make value judgements as to the benefit or possible harm of each thing, and to create a plan of action, and then act on it. The ability to project future states of reality from present states, then almost effortlessly initiate action to achieve one specific, favored state (including if the entities in our plan can themselve move, such as animals or people) makes it all the more amazing.

There are some interesting quirks to perception, which help dispell the notion that perception is somehow a process directly caused by sensory input. Let’s consider a few, in different modalities…

Vision enables us to see objects, arrayed from closest to furthest, from our head and eyes’ perspective. When we survey reality around us, we recognize all the objests that we’ve encountered before, but even ones we haven’t are rendered to us just as they physically exist. But note how there is size constancy of the objects—we do not perceive the size of objects literally, as they appear on our retina. For example, if you have a toy car on your window sill and look out to observe the road below, you continue to experience the toy car as “tiny” but the real cars as “full size cars”, even though the area of both on your retina might be the same.

Although audition (hearing) is concerned with sound, and at its base processes raw sound waves, we actually perceive most auditory input not as sounds, but rather as the entities in space that are emitting those sounds. When you see a bird and hear it chirp, your perception is a unified one of a “chirping bird.” This integration has an interesting property called visual dominance. What this means is that if there is a discrepancy between what is seen and from where the sound is coming, the brain fuses the two. This is why TV audio works: even though the speakers are typically at the side or bottom, when you see things making sounds on the screen, such as people talking, you perceive the sound coming from their lips, not below the TV. This feature of consciousness makes a lot of sense. From an engineering standpoint, it is extremely difficult to try to tease out the specific source entities in a noisy sound field; consciousness seems to do this effortlessly, and lets us selectively focus on each particular entity.

Think about whenever you may have grasped a stick to tap on the ground, or even a utensil when eating. Even though from a physical standpoint, the only thing actually happening is vibration from the stick or spoon registering on your palm, what you actually perceive is the stick at the point it hits the ground or spoon where it taps a glass. (Try it!) Your consciousness is more or less extending your body with the implement, which again, is extremely useful, as opposed to bewildering vibrations in your palm.

Notice how in all these cases, and many more besides, that while consciousness is maintaining fidelity to reality, it is transforming raw sensory experience into a highly augmented and integrated experience of reality. It even combines valence with percepts, such as fear experienced as part of perceiving a dangerous animal, or pleasure when seeing an attractive face.

So all of the above, plus many more examples, definitely imply that some kind of processing and integrating of sensory data is occurring. So consciousness is not, in some vague sense, the same as reality; and facilities such as evaluating entities, and projecting then acting to achieve future goals is something that has no apparent referent in physical reality.

The reason that consciousness went unexplained—and was unexplainable—for millennia is very simple: there was nothing in the physical engines of man that rivals it; trying to explain it was absolutely impossible. Even such speculations as existed were not even close to the mark. It has only been in recent decades (mostly the 1960s onward) that knowledge in the realm of psychology and especially neuroscience has amassed to the point where we can now make very many scientifically sound claims about the correlation between consciousness and the operation of the brain. There have now been thousands upon thousands of studies that relate neural firing in various well-known areas of the brain to conscious phenomena such as perception. (Vision has been particularly well studied.)

Neuroscientists and psychologists use a variety of experimental and observational techniques to learn about the brain, and how its operations relate to consciousness. Here are some of the techniques:
* Subject experiments: many conventional psychological experiments, typically with human subjects, help inform how the brain works, particularly experiments in perception that help elucidate the mechanisms of sensory processing.
* Electrical probes into brain areas: while mostly conducted on monkeys and rats, some have been done on humans, such as those with severe epilepsy and other disorders. Probes can be used to both monitor neural activity, as well as introduce voltage spikes that stimulate neural firing.
* Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): these use slightly modified MRI machines, to enable scientists to conduct experiments on human subjects in the machine, via screens and audio; although I personally think this technique is much less definitive than its proponents claim (for reasons too technical to cover here), it has seemed to provide some interesting data on the place in the brain more responsible than others for dealing with a given type of task or perceptual input.
* Brain damage case studies: patients with brain damage to specific areas of the brain, along with the deficits they exhibit in conscious terms, can help scientists attribute the areas being involved in that facility; it also helps to rule out much if any direct involvement of that area in apparently untouched faculties of their consciousness.
* Modeling: computational models, with an example being the models presented in the O’Reilly book.

An aside on modeling… Modeling is sometimes seen as “not science” by some in the psychological community. (I can’t help but editorially note the irony of this, given we are supposed to accept climate models as authoritative science!) I share the belief of O’Reilly that models are far more than tools to help explain something. A good model can actually help discover things, which can then be validated or dismissed using other methods.

Now while it is certainly true, that neuroscientists and psychologists have not been able explain what every area of the brain does; neural processing is highly distributed, parallel, and going inward away from sensory and motor areas, abstract (for now.) However given the overwhelming preponderance of evidence linking brain activity with operations of consciousness, along with the fact that the brain is evidently a closed system of processing involving only the neurons comprising it, we are finally able as philosophers of mind to start making definitive, scientifically backed claims about how consciousness is implemented.

Since I assert that understanding consciousness requires (some) understanding of the brain, I offer the following short section that provides what I consider the barest facts about the brain as relates to consciousness. (If you’ve studied neuroscience or O’Reilly’s book, you can skip this.) See the O’Reilly book’s website for excellent diagrams!

Simple primer of brain structure and processing

The basic building block of the brain and nervous system is the neuron. The neuron is a specialized type of cell whose purpose is integrating signals from many other neurons (up to tens of thousands) and when a certain threshold of these signals is reached, sending its own unitary signal, a spike, on to many, again up to tens of thousands, of listening neurons. The part of the neuron that spikes is called the axon. The parts that receive axonal input from other neurons are called dendrites.

So the important characteristic to note, is that the neuron is essentially a digital device; a spike is a single notable event. However the information conveyed seems to not be digital, as in a computer, but is rather an analog signal conveyed by the rate at which a neuron spikes; this seems to indicate the degree to which it is receiving what it is tuned to sense.

The brain is not an undifferentiated morrass of interconnected neurons; to the contrary it is organized into highly separate, distinct areas. Each area seems to be concerned with a specific processing task, although as we move more centrally, away from areas that handle sensory input, it may not always be understood. A mechanism of competitive dynamics allows only the most active neurons (20-25%) in an area to remain active; others are relatively suppressed. The resulting pattern of activity across the area is thought to encode the dynamic meaning being held at the time, and the active signals of this set then project on to various other areas, which are duly informed.

Areas are connected by tracts of axons to and from other areas. An area typically receives from and projects to many other areas. But logic and order to these projections has been observed, at least in sensory areas.

One of the most notable features of the connectivity of the cortex is reciprocity: virtually every area B that receives an axonal tract from area A, also sends back to A a tract from B. Computationally, this has been demonstrated (by O’Reilly) to be a critical computational feature of the brain, its “secret sauce” so to speak.

For example, in perceptual processing areas, more distal (near the senses) areas, typically encode and compress the data, and send it on to subsequent areas, which both compress it further, and remove sensoriotopic information. For example, in vision, there are areas V1-V2-V4-IT, in which the expansive V1 maps quite directly to the retina, on up to IT, in which virtually all the information about where on the retina something is has been lost, while now encoding information regarding what objects the subject is seeing. This process is helped greatly by the descending axonal projections, which help provide context to earlier areas, which then more strongly emphasize features and encodings that correspond to such an object.

(Psychologists speaking of such “top-down” connections, frequently use the word “attention”, even though that implies volition, which many disavow. Regardless, I believe this bidirectional connectivity is an essential architectural feature of even being able to have volition—it is an important mechanism whereby the still rather elusive process of volition, which sits at the core of our consciousness, is able to exert causative effect widely across the brain. I will treat the subject of volition more thoroughly in a separate essay.)

Finally, for completion, although perhaps not necessary to understand consciousness qua faculty… the strength of the dendritic connection between a sending neuron and receiving neuron—i.e. how relatively strong is the impact of a spike on the receiving neuron’s integration of all senders—is generally not fixed, but plastic. It is subject to being strengthened and weakened over time, under the influence of several mechanisms. This is seemingly the mechanism most responsible for the ability to learn over time.

There are a number of subcortical structures in the brain, highly interconnected with the cortex, and functionally understood to various degrees. For example, sensory signals from all modalities except smell project first to a structure called the thalamus, and then on to cortex; various areas in cortex continue to interconnect to thalamus. The amygdala seems highly associated with affective processing (emotional processing, good/bad valence etc.) The basal ganglia are critical to action selection, and seem to have been recruited in humans in operations of thinking. The hippocampi seem deeply involved in acquisition and recall of what is called episodic memory: memory of specific things, events, and so on. The cerebellum, while comprising perhaps 10% the brain’s volume, contains 50-80% of its neurons; it is associated with fine-tuning of motor control.

As a summary reminder: most of the “correlates of consciousness” are related to cortical functioning, with the remainder attributable, as parts of a whole, to subcortical structures and their function. All are functions of the brain.

The Explanation

We are going to consider, and explain, consciousness in two aspects. The first, I will call “objective consciousness”—this is not consciousness as only observed externally, but rather is consciousness only considered operationally, from our internal point of reference, but not including our actual experiencing of it (so-called “qualia”.) The second, I will call “experiential consciousness”, which (enthusiastically) includes the first-person experience of being conscious. Most of my explanation covers the first, but it wouldn’t be complete without also covering the second (over which philosophers of mind make endless hay.)

“Objective” Consciousness

In order to make the claims I am about to make, we need to establish some things that are known about neurons, and the brain.

First, it has been overwhelmingly demonstrated that neural firing and brain processing is what gives rise to perception. Any interruption to this firing, by whatever cause, causes perception mediated by those sensory nerves to cease or be compromised. Stimulating such areas in the brain to which those sensory neurons project, causes perceptual flashes.

Likewise, it has been overwhelmingly demonstrated that neural firing and brain processing gives rise to our ability to physically move. It is painfully obvious in cases of spinal injury (which typically also results in perceptual loss, such as body sensations). But there are also many diseases of the brain that affect motor functioning, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with other impairments.

Modification of the brain with psychoactive drugs results in changes to consciousness. The predominant sites of effect of the drug, or the neurotransmitters involved (and how those have been found to relate to conscious states) demonstrates a clear causal chain between brain activity and conscious states.

There is an interesting relationship, when considering the primacy of reality, between perceptual processing mechanisms in the brain, and the discernable artifacts of perceiving. I state this as The Primacy Inversion Postulate:

That which is closest to reality in the brain, such as sensory input,
is most distal in terms of the machinery of consciousness;
whereas
That which is most immediate and concrete in consciousness, such as percepts,
comprises the greatest degree of neural integration underlying it.

There is a lot of evidence that sensory processing follows a “divide and conquer” approach along some major dimensions, such as, in vision, “what”, “where”, “motion”, and other aspects. Everything is fused in our perception; but brain damage studies reveal strange deficits. For example, if the “motion”-centric areas are damaged, subjects report a peculiar condition wherein they can see objects, but can’t really “see” motion.

So this fact of specialization in processing, but eventual integration, along with my first postulate, explain why the search for “the neural correlates of consciousness” cannot be successful, unless the search is actually for the highly distributed, but integrated neural ensembles comprising the distinct existents of consciousness, particularly percepts.

More important though to our purpose than the legion of discoveries of specific neural correlates of consciousness, is what we know about the brain as a whole.

The brain is composed of neurons and support cells. Apart from interesting occassional findings that show some effect on neuronal firing by support cells, the brain is otherwise a closed control system consisting of neurons, their axonal sending tracts, and their dendritic receiving tracts. Information about physical reality comes into the brain via transducers of various kinds, which map the physical attribute being sensed into neural firing at a rate that varies as the measure of the attribute (light waves, sound waves, pressure on the skin, etc.)

The operation of the brain does its thing, whatever that is, and is able to cause effect in reality via motor neurons stimulating muscles cells, along with a variety of modulatory signals that modify the operation of sensory processing, and in some cases cause secretion of hormones.

We may not have figured out how everything in the brain works, but we do know with certainty that there is nothing but the brain. And there is overwhelming evidence relating virtually every aspect of consciousness to brain activity and structures.

We have reached a point where it is possible to dismiss ALL dualist theories of consciousness. This includes, obviously religious or mystic theories (a “soul” in other dimensions, etc.) It also includes such quasi-scientific theories as “quantum fields” and such.

The reason dualism is fundamentally false, is the binding problem. In order for consciousness to be something other than brain activity, in spite of the overwhelming correlations, this “other” would somehow need to be bound to neural activity, both to be able to monitor sensory data, but more importantly influence it, to induce physical action (or the neurons causing that.) But there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of such an “other” or its necessary binding mechanisms. Consciousness has causal effect in the world; man and animals act, by way of their body. The “other” would need in some way to exert causal force on the motor system. Yet no such force is evident. No possible mechanism of action is in evidence. Neurons are cells like any other in the body. The mechanism of integration and firing is well understood. You can’t have neural areas firing according to well understood causes, yet somehow obeying unseen and undetected influences.

Asserting that some “other” is what is consciousness, despite the overwhelming evidence that brain activity is what is responsible, is as mystic and unscientific as biology reverting to belief in Élan vital (French for “vital impetus” or “vital force”) to explain life, rather than explaining it as the natural action of cells.

Yet this demand for such a thing persists widely even in educated people who decry religious mysticism. I attribute this to two main causes:
1. the psychological bias to “demand” an existent be a thing (or force) as mentioned in the opening;
2. the confusion or unwillingness to believe “mere” matter, no matter how amazingly arranged, could give rise to the experiental aspect of consciousness.

I address both of these with my explanation.

Here is what I assert. It is shockingly simple, but I will discuss it. Since it is not physically possible for there to be anything physically involved in consciousness than its corresponding brain activity, then due to the Law of Exclusion, it can only be that brain activity.

I am not saying it might be that activity. I am not saying it is probably that activity. I am stating with absolute certainty that it can only be that brain activity.

Apart from the scientific evidence involved, there is something more philosophically profound that can be asserted…

If neural activity cannot be consciousness, then nothing can be.

What proponents of “the other” (whatever it is) are setting up, yet not acknowledging, is an infinite regression, which is not physically possible. Because if they reject neural activity, but insist some other thing must be consciousness, how can that be consciousness? Because whatever it turns out to be, it will ultimately have some identity, some composition, some differentiable aspects, some mechanism. And how could that possibly be conscious? The processes of the brain can’t be conscious (they assert), so how can the pieces and processes of this “other” system be conscious? Of course it can’t… it needs a meta-consciousness. Only in that can there be consciousness. But then that has identity, and needs a meta-meta… etc.

“Experiential” (Subjective) Consciousness

Now at this point we have made an extremely strong case for brain activity correlating with and in fact being consciousness. But here is where some philosophers of mind, such as David Chalmers, bristle. “You may,” they say, “have explained consciousness as a sort of machine operating in the brain, but you have not explained the phenomena of awareness, why we are aware, why do we experience red as red and green as green? Why do we feel, why do we experience pleasure and pain? In short, your explanation leaves out almost the whole thing to be explained.” David Chalmers has cast this using a thought experiment: Zombie Mary. He posits the existence of a Mary who has all the same brain elements, all the outward behavior of a person, but has no experience whatsoever. “What explains the experience?” asks Chalmers.

Fair enough. But here is where I part ways with these philosophers, and demand that reality must arbitrate this point. In order to put a stake in the heart of zombie Mary (to mix monster metaphors), we must look at what physically exists, and further, again ask ourselves whether anything more COULD exist than what we observe exists.

We have already demonstrated the invalidity of dualist theories, which accounts for anything scientifically plausible. So just as we rejected needing anything other than brain activity to explain the operational (objective) aspects of consciousness, we must likewise reject needing anything other than brain activity to explain the experiental (subjective) aspect of consciousness.

Consciousness is not a side-project or part time job for the brain; the architecture of the brain, and the dynamic processes inhabiting it, have as their teleology (their end for existing) the erection and maintenance of consciousness. This should not be surprising, since consciousness is the faculty on which the animal that possesses it depends.

Let’s stop and reconsider what the brain processes underlying consciousness do. They create an amazingly sophisticated “reality simulator”, a realtime mirror of many important attributes of things in the physical world, including our body. The standard of reference in things such as distance of an object from us, is in terms of our own body.

But beyond the faculty of perceiving the here and now, is the amazing faculty of projection, wherein simultaneous to the current, we can create imaginings of future states, both as possibly enacted by external things like animals, but also as results of our own action. We get internal feedback on expected valence of these possibilities, which can provider further input to the projection process. When (or if) we adjudge a particular future state enacted by ourselves to be beneficial, we then engage in the action to achieve it.

But perception and awareness are not passive processes; although the underlying machinery of these processes seem to operate automatically, we are never aware in an instant of the totality of that which is available to us. Instead, our volition is in constant operation, selecting that to which we attend, as part of the overall process of evaluation and action selection.

There is an interesting relation between volition and that of which we can potentially be aware: the scope of operation of volition, establishes the potential surface of awareness. (This is why we have no conscious awareness of the earlier stages of perceptual processing.)

Now, to “qualia”… In order that the simulation that mirrors reality can become a means of evaluation and action, it is necessary that things in reality come to be integrated as sim-things, and that their various attributes, at least those able to be detected by our senses, be represented in way that they are distinguishable for purposes of evaluation and action selection. This is exactly “qualia”; this is why red and green are different experiences and thus differentiable.

And things like pleasure and especially pain can be understood operationally in addition to experientially. Pain is, in essence, a “forcing” or “short-circuiting” of volition. In a neutral state, with immediate needs met (thirst, hunger, etc.) volition is truly unconstrained; the animal can explore its surroundings, focus on what it wants, consider what it wants. But a condition of pain compromises volition, and brings some aspect of our body into awareness unconditionally. It forces a goal of eliminating the cause of the pain to be constantly considered. The “severity” of the pain, is exactly the degree to which we begin losing volitional control. Since volition is inherent in awareness, it is no surprise that when pain is so severe that it eliminates volition altogether, we also lose consciousness.

The animal brain is clearly not a computer program (or a thermostat.) It enacts a nearly miraculous process, a control system that puts the animal in direct contact with external reality (and its body), and enables the animal to evaluate potential future actions, and then enact them, its brain automatically calculating from future state, the intermediate actions needed to achieve it.

There is only one possible explanation for the fact that this edifice gives rise to the phenomena of subjective experience. The operation of this unique process, and the mechanism of volition, which we exercise continuously from waking, even when looking around, IS consciousness and IS what is responsible for our first person experience of it. The two are inseparable. There cannot possibly be a “zombie Mary”; an entity with a body and corresponding brain processes of consciousness IS conscious, by definition.

Conclusion

Everything that exists has a nature, an identity. Everything that exists can be explained. Consciousness, particularly the subjective experience of consciousness, exists. It can therefore be explained. We have ruled out anything but brain processes to explain the objectively measurable aspects of consciousness. The objective aspects correspond exactly to the subjective aspects. There can be no further explanation, other than this is the way reality is.

Life is a metaphysical existent beyond the simple matter it comprises; it has new categories of action, and possesses teleology (action directed toward a goal) that inanimate matter does not possess. Likewise, consciousness is a metaphysical existent above the living matter that enacts it. This phenomenon of awareness, this experience, is possible in reality, when enacted by senses, motility, and a brain with a structure that creates it. And further, through induction, we can assume that animals that share the essential structural and operational basis for this process, and share every behavioral manifestation (apart from those based on reason) also possess consciousness, in the same experiential way in which we have it.

(But what about machines? That’s the subject of another essay…)

I describe my explanation as a proof, of a fairly unique kind. I acknowledge you can’t just go running around saying, “I can’t imagine anything else”… in general. But this is a very specific existent. The discovered neural correlates of consciousness are quite compelling. Over all, there are some forms of evidence linking all known phenomenal aspects of consciousness with brain function, even if in some cases it involves brain damage that results in clear impediments in consciousness. It is clear the brain is a closed system. There is nothing in the neuron that can’t be explained in principle by the same mechanisms involved in any cells. We can rule out “the yet-undiscovered conscious existent” due to binding contradictions. We can rule out “consciousness must require a ‘higher mechanism’ beyond physical brain function”, by pointing out that no matter what that mechanism is, it must obey the laws of identity and causality; it must have a nature and method of functioning, which according to our own rejection of brain processes, thus requires a “higher higher mechanism”, a “meta-mechanism”, thus entailing infinite regress, an impossibility. When it is impossible by physical law, and metaphysical law, for some “consciousness thing or force” to exist, then only one possibility remains: the brain processes that enact consciousness. And since the subjective aspect of consciousness exists, and maps to its objective identity, it is obligatory to accept that such an objective entity intrinsically results in that phenomena; the two are inseperable.

Consciousness has been explained.