If Consciousness Is Intrinsic, What Follows?

General Philosophy
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In the thread on Philosophy of Mind and of Consciousness, several of us have been debating whether thinking is intrinsic to reality or whether it arises contingently when conditions are right. I want to explore a consequence of that debate that we have not yet addressed.

The question of whether consciousness is intrinsic or contingent is not only a question about the nature of mind. It is a question about the nature of freedom.

Consider two positions.

On the first — the emergentist position — consciousness is a product of sufficient organizational complexity. It arises when neural, social, and cultural conditions happen to come together. It is wonderful. It is also contingent. The universe did not have to produce it. And because it is contingent, it can in principle be regulated, managed, or restricted by whatever social structures happen to govern the conditions under which it operates. If consciousness is a product, then institutions that control the means of production — education, information, communication — control consciousness itself.

On the second — the position I have been defending, following Spinoza and Ilyenkov — consciousness is not a product but an attribute of substance. Thinking is co-original with extension. It does not arise from matter; it is how matter knows itself. And if this is true, then restricting consciousness is not regulating a product. It is attempting to restrict an attribute of reality.

What follows from the second position? I want to lay out four consequences and address the strongest objection to each, because a position that cannot survive its best criticism is not worth holding.

First consequence. Every individual is a point at which substance becomes aware of itself. Restricting access to information or expression of thought distorts the process by which reality understands itself.

The objection: not all restriction is distortion. Filtering disinformation protects understanding — unfiltered flow includes lies that distort more than censorship does. The answer: filtering and censorship are different operations. Filtering says “this is false, here is why” — it adds intelligibility. Censorship says “this does not exist” — it removes intelligibility. The criterion is whether a restriction adds information to the system or subtracts it. A correction is not censorship. A deletion is.

Second consequence. If thinking is realized only through activity — through making, speaking, building, experimenting — then restricting activity that follows from thought is restricting thought itself. Freedom of thought without freedom of action is an incoherent position.

The objection: not every action should be permitted. A thought about violence does not justify violence. Freedom of thought and freedom of action are different categories. The answer: the principle contains its own limit — the condition of non-aggression. The sovereignty of another individual is the boundary. Freedom of action is not absolute, but its restriction must be justified by violation of another’s sovereignty, not by institutional convenience. The question is always: whose sovereignty is being protected, and whose is being overridden?

Third consequence. The only natural limit to one individual’s freedom is the sovereignty of another individual — not the will of a state or the weight of tradition.

The objection: without a state, who protects the sovereignty of the weak from the strong? Pure individualism leads to the rule of force. The answer: the claim is not that coordination is unnecessary, but that coordination is not the source of rights. Rights are not granted by institutions — they are recognized by them. A state can be an instrument for protecting sovereignty, but when the instrument becomes the source, it becomes a threat to what it was meant to protect. The question is not whether we need institutions, but whether institutions derive their authority from the rights they protect or the other way around.

Fourth consequence. Every distortion of the flow between consciousnesses — concealment, deception, manipulation — prevents one thinking being from acting with knowledge of its real situation. This is exploitation in the ontological sense: placing another consciousness in conditions that do not correspond to reality.

The objection: total transparency is impossible and undesirable. Privacy is also a right. Demanding full openness is totalitarianism in reverse. The answer: the claim is not about individual privacy but about closure within shared decision-making. I have the right not to tell you about my personal life. I do not have the right to conceal from you information on which your decisions about our shared life depend. Privacy protects sovereignty. Closure in the context of collective activity violates it. The distinction is between what is mine alone and what belongs to the space between us.

So here is the question I want to put to the forum. If you believe consciousness is intrinsic to reality — if you are a substance monist, a panpsychist, a dual-aspect theorist, or anyone who holds that thinking is not an accident — then what does your ontology imply about freedom? And if you believe consciousness is contingent — a lucky break in an indifferent universe — then on what basis do you ground the rights of conscious beings, other than mutual convenience?

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I will refer back to David Chalmer’s influential paper Facing Up the Problem of Consciousness- not to defend Chalmers, in particular, nor to pursue the way he develops his subsequent philosophy. I want only to refer to a specific paragraph which I hope will provide a more focussed understanding of what ‘thinking’ and ‘consciousness’ mean in this context.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

My interpretation of this is that consciousness here is the capacity for experience. This is also known in philosophy as ‘ipseity’, which is the capacity for subjective experience or being the subject of experience.

I don’t by any means limit subjectivity to humans. Whilst humans possess a unique (so far as we know) form of ratonal-linguistic consciousness, it seems unarguable that at least mammals and birds are also subjects of experience, although where or whether the line can be drawn between animals with a sense of subjectivity and its absence is obviously difficult (see the mirror test).

So from this, I say consciousness is intrinsic, as it is the quality that begins to manifest in living organisms from the earliest strata. Even if rudimentary organisms are not sentient or self-aware in the sense that the higher animals are, they still differentiate themselves from their environment and maintain some sense of functional autonomy which differentiates them from the inorganic. In that sense they too embody the ‘capacity for experience’ even if rudimentary.

But there’s also a sense in which consciousness is primary, as it is that through which and in which the world is disclosed. It is not primary as substance or an objective existent, but as the basis of the capacity for experience. This is something that is central to the development of phenomenology:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place ~ Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology p144

So, as to the nature of freedom. There’s obviously political freedom and equality, foundations of the liberal political order (and under attack from many quarters in today’s environment.) And they are important! But there’s also the more traditional sense of inner or spiritual freedom, associated with philosophical spirituality in the Greek and Indian traditions. That encompasses a dimension which is often absent or neglected in much modern political discourse.

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I believe consciousness is intrinsic to reality. I do not believe consciousness and thinking are the same thing. So I need a third position. :grinning_face:

How does this quality that does not exist in non-living matter begin to manifest in living organisms from the earliest strata? Is the quality of life the same thing as the quality of consciousness?

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@Wayfarer

The distinction between consciousness as capacity for experience and thinking as cognitive operation is important, and I should have been more precise. My post used “consciousness” and “thinking” loosely. Let me tighten it.

I agree that consciousness in the phenomenological sense — ipseity, the felt quality of experience — is distinct from cognitive operations like judging, reasoning, and deciding. But I think the political consequences I described follow from both. Whether we ground rights in the capacity for experience (your approach via Chalmers and Husserl) or in the attribute of thought (my approach via Spinoza and Ilyenkov), the four consequences hold: restricting the conditions under which consciousness operates is restricting consciousness itself.

Your point about inner or spiritual freedom is well taken. There is a dimension of freedom that is not political — the freedom to understand, to see clearly, to act from insight rather than compulsion. Spinoza calls this the third kind of knowledge: intuitive understanding that produces blessedness. Ilyenkov would call it the capacity to think by the form of the object rather than by the form of one’s prejudice. This inner freedom is not in tension with the political consequences I described — it is their foundation. You cannot think clearly if the information you receive has been distorted. You cannot achieve inner freedom in conditions of ontological exploitation.

@Patterner

Your question is the right one. If consciousness is intrinsic but thinking is not the same as consciousness — then what is the relationship?

Ilyenkov’s answer: consciousness in the broad sense — responsiveness to environment, self-maintenance, functional autonomy — is present in all living organisms. But thinking — the capacity to grasp the form of the object and act according to it rather than according to fixed reflexes — requires something more: social practice, language, culture, tools. The child does not think until the social ensemble reshapes its brain through imposed activity.

So consciousness and thinking are related as genus and species. All thinking beings are conscious. Not all conscious beings think. The transition from consciousness to thinking is not automatic — it requires the “inorganic body” of culture. A cat is conscious. A cat does not think in Ilyenkov’s sense. The difference is not in the substrate but in the mode of activity.

And to your deeper question — how does the quality that does not exist in non-living matter begin to manifest in living organisms? This is where Spinoza and Ilyenkov diverge from both dualism and reductive materialism. Spinoza says: the quality was never absent. Every mode of extension has a corresponding mode of thought. But the “thought” of a rock is not experience — it is intelligibility, the fact that the rock has a complete description under the attribute of thought. Experience begins when the mode becomes complex enough to maintain itself against its environment. That is what life is: anti-entropy, self-maintenance, the beginning of subjectivity.

Is the quality of life the same as the quality of consciousness? On this account: yes. Life IS the first manifestation of consciousness — not as felt experience in the human sense, but as the capacity for self-directed activity in the face of dissolution.

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I’d like to understand that a little better.

If asked what I make of the non-living universe, in that I defer to the scientific account. The focus of my philosophy is rather to challenge the view that the mind is the product of the processes which science is able to describe. This is the ‘reductionist’ stance, which you also reject. But as to the ‘intelligibility’ of the inanimate (e.g. ‘the rock’) - I’m at a loss.

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@Wayfarer

The rock question is fair and I owe a clearer answer.

When Spinoza says every mode of extension has a corresponding mode of thought, he does not mean the rock experiences anything. He means the rock is fully describable — it has a determinate structure that can in principle be grasped by an act of understanding. The “thought” of the rock is not the rock thinking. It is the fact that the rock is intelligible — that it has properties, relations, and a causal history that make it a possible object of knowledge.

This sounds trivial until you ask: why is the rock intelligible at all? Why does it have a determinate structure rather than being chaotic noise? The reductionist says: because physics. But physics itself is intelligible — it has laws that can be understood. Why? The regress either terminates in something unintelligible (brute fact) or in something whose intelligibility is constitutive (Spinoza’s substance).

So the “intelligibility” of non-living matter is not a mystical claim. It is the observation that reality has structure — and that this structure is not an accident but a feature of what reality is. Spinoza calls this feature an attribute. You might call it something else. But the philosophical point stands: if you accept that the universe is intelligible, you have already accepted that something like thought — not experience, not feeling, but the capacity to be understood — is woven into the fabric of what exists.

The transition from intelligibility to experience happens when a mode becomes complex enough to maintain itself against dissolution — when it becomes alive. And the transition from experience to thinking happens when that living mode enters social practice. Three levels, one substance.

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Let me step back from the details and state the position compactly. Six theses.

1. The ontological status of thought. Consciousness is not a privilege granted by institutions, nor a product of social contract. As an inalienable attribute of matter — on par with extension and motion — thinking is prior to any form of human organization. States and societies are temporary forms, non-living, possessing no subjectivity. Thinking is an eternal property of substance.

2. The inalienability of free information exchange. Since each individual is a unique point at which matter becomes aware of itself, any restriction on access to information or expression of thought is an act of artificial distortion of the very nature of reality. Restricting thinking is an attempt to restrict the development of matter in its highest form.

3. The sovereignty of activity. If thinking is realized only through activity in the external world, then prohibiting action dictated by the logic of thought (under the condition of non-aggression) is equivalent to prohibiting the very existence of consciousness. Freedom of thought is inseparable from freedom of activity.

4. The boundary of subjectivity. The only natural limit to an individual’s freedom is not the will of the state or tradition, but the physical and mental sovereignty of another individual. The freedom of one “reflection of matter” ends where the violation of another “reflection” begins. This is the only limit dictated by the structure of being itself, not by artificial prohibitions.

5. The illegitimacy of mental control. Any structures — state, religious, or corporate — that attempt to impose filters on the process of cognition are declared ontologically incoherent. They attempt to privatize an attribute of matter that by right belongs to the entire Universe and to each of its embodiments individually.

6. The closed door as the root of exploitation. Every distortion of the flow between consciousnesses — concealment, lies, manipulation, censorship — is an act of exploitation in the ontological sense: one reflection of matter places another in conditions that do not correspond to reality, depriving it of the ability to act with knowledge of the actual situation. At the dawn of humanity, closedness was adaptive. Today it is an atavism, destroying collective thinking — the only instrument capable of solving problems beyond the reach of any individual.

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I think the relationship between consciousness and thinking is the same as the relationship between consciousness and everything else. Consciousness experiences thinking, just as it experiences things other than thinking.

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This may be one place where Chalmers and Husserl differ. For Husserl, consciousness is intentional activity, not capacity for experience. This “of-ness” isn’t a power that may or may not be exercised; it is what consciousness is.

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Well, here we are dealing with questions of fundamental metaphysics, so Kant’s fog banks and melting icebergs are a constant threat.

But then, my difficulty may simply be with the word “substance.” It makes the ultimate ground sound like a kind of underlying sub-stratum. Another perspective — which I associate with Schopenhauer’s reading of Kant — is that intelligibility arises in the relationship of subject and object. The intelligibility of the rock, such as it is, arises from the fact of its meaning for us, as the kinds of creatures that we are.

The three-level picture you outline actually isn’t that far from how I tend to think about things either.

Where I still hesitate is in treating experience as something that appears only once a mode becomes sufficiently complex to sustain itself as life - hence, again, as a product or an outcome of mindless physics. My instinct is closer to the idea that interiority is already implicit in being itself, even if it only becomes explicit in living organisms and reflective thought. Peirce’s category of Firstness — the idea that qualitative immediacy belongs to the most basic mode of being — sometimes seems an intuitive way of expressing that sense.

I read some of the essays in Hans Jonas Phenomenon of Life recently. He argues that modernity is unable properly to address the issue of the meaning of life and that this has ontological roots. Modern science fails to understand life because the ontology it accepts is an ontology of death. And death, of course, is unable to feel and comprehend life. And why? Because modern ontology mistakes its scientific and methodological abstraction with reality. Then Husserl: having first divided the Universe into the objective (primary) and subjective (secondary) attributes and qualities, the locus of meaning is subjectivised and personalised, whereby the individual ego (or social group) becomes the sole arbiter of value, and science of what is real. The world as it is in itself is seen as devoid of purpose and intentionality, and meaning a matter for the individual. Jonas says overcoming this problem will involve overcoming the modern custom to consider the (human) subject as isolated from nature and other living beings. It is the isolated ego thinking itself into existence that is the crux of the predicament of modernity. And that is more than a philosophical argument, it is a state of existence.

This of course is very different to either Spinoza’s or Ilyenkov’s philosophical outlook, although it might have more in common with the former.

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I’m often surprised that there is less commonality between Chalmers and phenomenology, generally, than might be expected. Even though his famous Facing Up essay seems to occupy the same territory, he never seems to develop his ideas in that direction. He’s still more part of the analytic than the continental side of philosophy. Although that does have the advantage of opening up the whole conversation more on analytical philosophy’s terms.

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Intelligibility seems to be something deeply rooted in human nature. But, for example, when we say that a language is intelligible, this is determined by the nature of the sign, which is differential and can always lead to nonsense (the unintelligible); it is always immersed in an unlimited semiosis as an internal possibility. In that sense, we must not take rationality and intelligibility for granted in human beings, nor in the way they relate to the world.

I do not find it so easy to equate consciousness with intelligibility. This is very much in keeping with the rationalism of which Spinoza is a part. Madness serves as an example of how a person may possess consciousness yet perhaps not understand the world in the same way as most of us. This demonstrates only one thing: that our consciousness can become submerged in the drift of the sign (drifting to the point of meaninglessness) and that this is an inevitable possibility. And whether we assume that consciousness is intrinsic or not, intelligibility (rationality) is never guaranteed, either on the part of the world or on the part of consciousness.

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@JuanZu

The madness example is genuinely instructive. A person in psychosis has consciousness but has lost the ability to grasp the intelligible structure of the world as most of us share it. If I had equated consciousness with intelligibility, this would refute my position.

But I did not equate them. I distinguished three levels: intelligibility (the structure of things that makes them describable), experience (the capacity of a living mode to maintain itself and respond to its environment), and thinking (the socially mediated capacity to grasp the form of the object). Madness disrupts the third level — thinking — without destroying the second — experience. The person in psychosis still experiences. They have lost the capacity for adequate thinking — for grasping the shared intelligible structure.

But here is the crucial point: the intelligibility of the world does not depend on anyone grasping it. The rock has a determinate structure whether or not anyone understands it, and whether or not the person looking at it is sane. Intelligibility is a feature of the object under the attribute of thought. Experience is a feature of the living subject. Thinking is what happens when the subject adequately grasps the object. Madness is a failure of the third, not an absence of the first.

Your point about the sign — that language can always drift toward nonsense — is well taken. Intelligibility is not guaranteed on the side of the subject. But on the side of the object, it is. The rock does not become unintelligible because we fail to understand it. Our failure is ours.

@Wayfarer

Jonas is deeply relevant here. His claim that modernity operates with an “ontology of death” — that science understands the world as mechanism and therefore cannot understand life — is very close to Ilyenkov’s critique of contemplative materialism. Both say: if you start from dead matter, you will never arrive at life. The question is where to start instead.

Jonas starts from the organism. Ilyenkov starts from social practice. Both refuse to start from dead mechanism. The difference: Jonas grounds subjectivity in metabolism (needful freedom — the organism’s precarious self-maintenance). Ilyenkov grounds subjectivity in labor (the transformation of nature through culturally mediated activity). Jonas gives you the organism as the first subject. Ilyenkov gives you the human collective as the first thinking subject.

Your instinct that interiority is implicit in being itself — Peirce’s Firstness — is not incompatible with Spinoza’s attribute of thought. The question is whether this implicit interiority needs to be made explicit through a specific ontological mechanism (metabolism for Jonas, social practice for Ilyenkov) or whether it simply is, from the start, without development (panpsychism). I think the developmental story matters — because without it, you cannot explain why rocks do not think and civilizations do.

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As a panpsychist I agree with your broad philosophy of mind. But I’m not sure what, if anything, follows from this ethically. Even accepting that far more of the universe is capable of feeling than we might usually expect, we don’t have to care about that. Ethics is a matter of will rather than objective fact, it seems to me.

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@bert1

You say ethics is a matter of will, not fact. That consciousness is intrinsic does not obligate us to care.

But consider what “not caring” means concretely. If you distort the information another consciousness receives — lie to them, conceal from them, manipulate their conditions — you are not merely being unkind. You are placing them in a situation that does not correspond to reality. They will act on false premises. Their activity will fail — not because they are stupid, but because the world they were given to work with was a fiction.

This is not a moral claim. It is a structural one. A bridge built on false load calculations collapses regardless of anyone’s feelings about it. A consciousness acting on distorted information fails regardless of whether we think it deserves consideration.

The question is not whether we are obligated to care about every sentient speck in the universe. The question is whether we are permitted to distort the conditions under which other thinking beings operate. My argument is that such distortion is self-defeating: it degrades the collective capacity for anti-entropy — the capacity of thinking beings to organize against dissolution. When you deceive, you do not just harm the deceived. You weaken the system of which you are a part.

So it is not sentiment that grounds the ethics. It is structure. You can refuse to care. But you cannot distort the information flow between consciousnesses without degrading the conditions of your own survival. That is not morality. That is physics applied to thinking.

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I see, thanks, that’s interesting. It seems quite a Kantian approach to ethics, perhaps? Grounding ethics in consistency.

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@bert1

The resemblance to Kant is real but the mechanism is different.

Kant derives ethics from the form of reason: an action is moral if its maxim can be universalized without contradiction. The test is logical consistency. The content does not matter — only the form.

My argument derives ethics from the structure of substance. Distorting information between consciousnesses is not wrong because it fails a universalizability test. It is wrong because it degrades the system’s capacity for anti-entropy — for organized action against dissolution. The test is not logical but physical: does the distortion weaken or strengthen the collective capacity to maintain order?

Kant gives you a formal criterion that works regardless of consequences. I give you a structural criterion where the consequences are the point. A lie is not wrong because you cannot universalize lying. It is wrong because a system built on lies cannot sustain itself — it loses the capacity to act on reality and eventually collapses.

The difference matters practically. Kant’s ethics permits the “noble lie” to be condemned on purely formal grounds. Mine condemns it on structural grounds — noble or not, the lie degrades the information architecture on which collective thinking depends. The intention is irrelevant. The structure is everything.

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It would seem a truism to observe that organic life precedes any form of human social practice. Or that the possibilities for freedom should be limited to what can be constituted by social practice, although there may be an ideological boundary there which Ilyenkov was obliged to observe, considering the context.

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@Evald

Nice job on the OP. I want to zero in on the challenge you pose at the end rather than litigate the Spinoza/Ilyenkov framework, because I think the ethical question is where the real action is — and where your argument actually has a gap.

You ask: if consciousness is contingent, what grounds rights beyond mutual convenience? But this is a false dilemma. Contingent in origin doesn’t mean arbitrary in normativity. The operations of conscious awareness — attending to experience, grasping intelligibility, weighing evidence, deliberating about what to do — have an internal normative structure that isn’t derived from whether consciousness is “intrinsic to substance” or emergently realized. It’s derived from the structure of the operations themselves. If you’re going to raise a question at all, you’re already committed to norms of inquiry that you can’t coherently repudiate. Try to argue that attentiveness, insight, and reasonable judgement are optional and you’ll performatively contradict yourself in the act of making the case.

So the emergentist doesn’t need to ground rights in “mutual convenience.” They can ground them in the fact that conscious agents who raise and adjudicate validity claims are already operating under normative demands that aren’t chosen or conventional — they’re constitutive of what it means to be inquiring at all. The right to freedom of thought, expression, access to information — these follow from the conditions required for inquiry to function, not from an ontological thesis about substance.

And honestly I think this is a problem for your position too, not just others. Even if thinking is “co-original with extension,” you still need to explain how you get from a metaphysical description to a normative claim. The move from “consciousness is an attribute of substance” to “therefore restricting it is wrong” smuggles in exactly the kind of normative premises that need independant justification. Spinoza himself was notoriously difficult to extract robust ethics from — substance doesn’t care about your sovereignty. You need something more than ontology to do the ethical work your four consequences are asking it to do.

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@Wayfarer

You are right that organic life precedes social practice. Ilyenkov does not deny this — he agrees with Jonas that life is the first manifestation of subjectivity. Where they diverge is on what makes the transition from life to thinking. Jonas says: metabolism, needful freedom, the organism’s precarious self-maintenance. Ilyenkov says: that gives you experience, but not thinking. Thinking requires tools, language, culture — the inorganic body that no organism produces alone.

So the sequence is: intelligibility (structure) → life (self-maintenance, Jonas) → thinking (social practice, Ilyenkov). Jonas and Ilyenkov are not opponents. They cover different transitions.

@EQV

Welcome to the Manifesto thread. Your objection is precise: I cannot move from “consciousness is an attribute of substance” to “therefore distorting information is wrong” without an independent normative bridge. Ontology does not generate norms by itself.

But my argument is not that substance commands us to be honest. It is that distortion is structurally self-defeating. A system that distorts the information flow between its parts degrades its own capacity to act on reality. This is not a norm derived from ontology — it is a consequence observable within any system that depends on accurate information to function.

You say norms arise from the structure of inquiry itself — attention, understanding, judgment. I agree. But notice: inquiry requires undistorted access to data. If someone censors your data before you attend to it, your inquiry fails not because you violated a norm but because the conditions for inquiry were sabotaged. My “norm” is not “you ought to be transparent.” It is: “if you want inquiry to work, you cannot distort its inputs.”

This is closer to your position than you might think. You ground norms in the structure of cognitional operations. I ground them in the structural conditions those operations require. The difference is whether you locate the normativity in the act (your view) or in the conditions that make the act possible (mine). I suspect we need both.