Guest Lecture by Axel Cleeremans

The value of consciousness

Abstract: Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us? In other words: What is consciousness good for? Does phenomenal experience have a function? Surprisingly, perhaps, many have answered “no”. In philosophy, epiphenomenalist and illusionist positions have gained strength, and so have panpsychist perspectives, which, while neither denying phenomenology nor its functions, paradoxically deflate it by ascribing it to all matter. The concept of free will has likewise been deconstructed to the point that it has become commonplace to think it simply does not exist. In psychology, while Freud’s influence has now waned, most relevant research nevertheless seems dedicated to documenting what we can do without awareness rather than because of it. This is reinforced by the stupefying advances of artificial intelligence research, which are suggestive that feeling things is simply unnecessary to carry out complex information processing. Finally, even consciousness research itself has fallen prey to deflationist views. The “search for the neural correlates of consciousness” — the main empirical program in consciousness research for over three decades — has been exclusively focused on identifying the neural basis of the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, so eluding the essential fact that experiences cannot exist independently of the subject whose experiences they are. Contra such views, we propose that subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’— is endowed with intrinsic value, and that it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others — aesthetics. And because experiences have value and guide behaviour, consciousness has a function. Congruently, Block (2023) writes, about Global Workspace Theory, that “[..] it may be conscious phenomenology that promotes global broadcasting, something like the reverse of what the global workspace theory of consciousness supposes.” Perhaps then, is it the case that the functions associated with consciousness are a consequence, rather than the cause, of phenomenal experience. Under this hypothesis of ‘phenomenal primacy’, we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents ‘experience’ things and ‘care’ about those experiences that they are ‘motivated’ to act in certain ways and that they ‘prefer’ some states of affairs vs. others. Thus, phenomenal experience might act as a mental currency of sorts that not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centred space—a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is ‘unified’.