I hope no one objects to me starting a fresh thread on this. It is significantly different from my previous. (Thank you for the feedback) and I’ve striven to bring it up to your standards:
Hard Problem of Appreciating Physical Reality - take two.
Philosophers ask: why does physical processing feel like anything at all? They call this the “explanatory gap,” which I believe stumbles because it lays a human perspective onto physical reality, rather than allowing the physical reality itself to dictate the story we tell about it.
I think that gap dissolves once we take evolutionary biology seriously — not as an abstract argument, but as the story of billions of years of interaction and feedback loops unfolding one day at a time, which this essay lays out.
This Earth-centrist perspective is founded on a keen appreciation of Earth’s robust evolutionary biological understanding.
Which in turn describes our physical reality with astounding fidelity. In spite of remaining incompleteness, I suggest at this point we know plenty enough for answering carefully formulated constructive questions regarding how complex biological processes developed the awareness, eventually self-awareness, that we witness throughout our living world.
The Earth-centrist, bottom up evolutionary understanding starts with subatomic particles that exist at the very boundary between matter and energy. From there natural laws methodically evolved complexity, following specific defined gradients. Step by measured quantum step of exquisitely exacting configurations, eventually forming some 92 different (naturally occurring) atomic entities. With a rigid consistency that follows all the way through to yet more exotic atoms, including 24 man-made elements. Each with unique qualities.
These atoms are entities. This is based on observations that they send and receive information, impinge upon, and accrete with other entities.
Of course it’s all on a quantum level. Awareness has nothing to do with it. This is not “panpsychism,” nothing is imbued with anything — it simply is what it is. Energetic physical stuff in their own right, taking up their own reference frame, interacting with others’ reference frames. Nothing more, nothing less.
Of course this developed over unimaginable eons’ worth of deep-time. Atoms evolved into complex aggregates. With increasing size, gravity entered the equation, and together with time and natural laws, atomic elements grew into a bewildering variety of interacting forms. On Earth, Dr. Robert Hazen has revealed how even minerals, the product of specific atomic “frame of reference” entities, went through their own amazing stages of evolution.
“Interacting” was the key driver of both cosmic and biological development, even before anything was aware.
What we do know is that objects influence each other and the whole, implying there is an awful lot of communicating going on. A cosmos filled with entities constrained within their own reference frames — each with particular physicality, bandwidth. Each oblivious to its being, because there was no need for it, and no means to it.
Still time passes, complexity and size increase, emergence happens.
Try imagining, complex molecular machines, basically frames of reference, within frames of reference, within yet more frames of reference, all having to interact with exquisite exactitude, pushed around by growth and environmental conditions and endless repetition. Progressing along a learning curve eventually establishing a method for recognizing its own reference frame? Organized complexity happens.
I ask because something earth-shattering (in a good way) happened half a billion years into Earth’s existence, when the Krebs cycle was hammered into existence. That is when CHNOPS (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulfur atoms) captured and harnessed electricity, energy into a microscopic motive force, that is, a charge gradient across a membrane directing work to be done. (See Peter Mitchell for the details.)
Thus creating a profoundly unique category of elements that invented the foundation of biology, which eventually blossomed into dynamic molecular interactions, and Life itself. The process that would lead down an unimaginably long path of deep time toward awareness, and biological creatures eventually achieving introspective consciousness.
Back to Earth, about a half billion years later, simple prokaryotic cells formed. Today we can observe images of molecular machines at work within single cells; the complexity is mind-boggling. Yet, this was simply the beginning, akin to an infant getting to know its body.
After another half a billion years, a few of those original prokaryotic cells managed to figure out how to capture at least one, probably more, distinct creatures, bacteria to be specific.
Instead of consuming them, a deal was struck, room & board for services rendered. Creating a new and unique cell of bewildering complexity and organizational abilities, the complex eukaryotic cell. The new boarder, mitochondria by name, has recently come under renewed scientific scrutiny.
In particular, Dr. Martin Picard, a professor at Columbia, has published icon-shattering research on mitochondria that goes well beyond beloved power plants. Like the bacteria they descend from, they have their own life cycle and produce offspring. They live in communities that cluster around the nucleus.
But where it gets really interesting is that his lab has identified stress-inducible molecules in blood and saliva tied to mitochondrial signaling. Picard has created a mitochondrial health index to study the mind-mitochondria connection in brain and immune tissue, and it shows how chronic stress accelerates cellular aging by raising the energetic cost of staying regulated. They uncovered that it was a two-way street with psychological states measurably altering mitochondrial function.
Furthermore, Bonnie Bassler at Princeton University has demonstrated “Quorum sensing” in bacteria. It turns out that bacteria produce and release chemical signaling called “autoinducers” that maintain “conversations” within bacterial communities. These conversations track population, nutrition resources and the general environment. They can sense defense agents and calculate when to engage in attack and other behaviors.
Also recently, the startling discoveries of bacteria producing chemical signals analogous to radio transmissions that influence behavior of other bacteria, published by Lee and Wong at UCLA.
None of this carries a banner “Awareness Factory.”
But it does show that complex communication and self-referencing are happening and that self-awareness probably has deep (and diffused) roots.
Where does that leave us? The outline is of amazingly organized sustaining systems, each occupying its own reference frame, with no clue of a self, but in constant interaction with other reference frames.
Then evolution brought us entities that possessed reference frames within reference frames, constantly communicating, out of which the first living organisms were created. Dr. Arthur Reber brings this reality alive with his Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC). His book “The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness” is another must read.
Dr. Michael Levin takes it from there and has demonstrated that bioelectrical fields enable cells and tissues to solve problems collectively before nervous systems existed! See Michael Levin, “Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue” (Entropy, 2024).
At the same time, Dr. Nick Lane can vividly compare and explain how a single eukaryotic cell is analogous to the largest of Earth’s megalopolises and then some.
Dr. Lane’s first book, published in 2002, followed by four more over the next two decades, provides perhaps the best introduction to this evolutionary, energy-exchanging, reality that science has been revealing for all serious thinkers to feast upon.
Where the “magic” happens is when we have a bazillion reiterations of entities; complexity building upon complexity; hitting upon the limits of growth; then having to find a workaround if increasing growth was to be achieved. And finding it!
What scientists are observing, down to the earliest tiniest levels of living organisms, is that it’s all about successful organization demanding exactingly accurate interactions with other distinct entities. Point being, call it what you want, life has been communicating and cooperating since the beginning.
I submit that consciousness is fundamentally all about processing interaction and feedback loops. Physics and chemistry happen.
Creatures, on the other hand, are in a constant dialogue with prediction, observation, evaluation, reaction, endlessly unfolding within their unique dynamic environments. For an understanding of the centrality of “prediction,” the go-to person is Lisa Feldman Barrett and her theory of constructed emotion.
Thanks to Earth’s unique character, biotic molecular arrangements found themselves within significantly fertile dynamic complex environments, with interactions becoming ever more involved and specific.
The increasing complexity of molecular systems created the differentiation that evolved specialized biological units for handling the various tasks required for accommodating this increasing size and complexity — including inner-cell, and later inner-creature, communication systems. Keep in mind there is no denying — emergence happens.
These unprecedented layers were built upon the nuance of already existing atomic/quantum interactions, communication, and cooperation systems.
My point being that Earth has long been populated with entities, incredibly complex molecular entities that were something, simply by virtue of their composition and specific dynamic interactions. But nothing was at home to perceive, or care.
What gets overlooked too often is that being ‘something’ is only half of life.
It is our interactions with other creatures and environments that make all the difference to one’s life.
Your biological being only takes on meaning as a someone, in regard to your interactions with other someones and circumstances.
“Interaction” is what is actually driving evolution, and that important detail gets way too little attention in philosophical circles.
Connection and awareness of “Self” was gradually built up over deep time generations — no switch was flipped; neither biological nor mythical. It simply required an evolutionary edge; time took care of the rest.
To review, Earth was formed basically 4.5 billion years ago. Some 500 million years after that the Krebs cycle was hammered out, when molecular machines figured out how to capture and eventually harness electricity to produce power.
It took another half billion years of time unfolding one short day after another, for the first simple cells to organize. From there it was another 1.5 to 2 billion years before eukaryotic cells unlocked the secrets for creating complex creatures. Part of the reason it took so long is that Earth’s resources and conditions needed to catch up to biology’s potential. Thanks to geology and changing climate those conditions finally appeared over 600 million years ago. The rest is history, starting with the Ediacaran and Cambrian “Explosion” of complex creatures, entities who were on a whole new level, demanding whole new complexities and efficiencies if these animals were going to survive.
Wouldn’t “awareness” seem to be a great advantage given the amazing new interactions creatures were now immersed within?
Mammals are some 225 million years old, first apes are about 25 million years old, with gorillas about 8 million years old — roughly the same age as first Hominids. As for modern humans, new findings are regularly pushing the date deeper into the past, now possibly as old as 350,000 years ago. Consider for a moment the experience and learning curves that unfolded over those eons of deep time.
For me it is inconceivable that a zombie, indifferent, simply reacting mechanically could ever have out-competed critters with skin in the game who were engaged with gusto.
Musing on it, it seems to me that the basis for philosophy’s Zombie mind experiment is akin to believing you can get rich gambling at the casino. The game offers hope, you can win, you do win, but in the long run, the house’s edge will suck every dollar out of your wallet just the same.
The Hard Problem simply assumes, for argument’s sake.
Presuming conceivability without contradiction isn’t the same as a demonstrated possibility.
In short, the lesson I’ve gained from Earth sciences is that “feeling like something” isn’t a philosophical mystery layered onto biology after the fact, it is an inevitable product of evolution and increasing complexity within nonstop feedback loops and interactions.
I find reassurance in the words of Dr. Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, who wrote a remarkably insightful book geared to the educated reader: The Hidden Spring. Solms argues that consciousness was born out of processing fundamental bodily feelings and emotions via signals processed in the brainstem rather than the cortex.
Evolving biological entities jostling together are exactly what built consciousness out of the biological structures that process these interacting loops. It was the very trait selection that made living complexity and introspection possible.
This explains why I find it all too easy to see the Hard Problem as an example of thinkers unconsciously clinging to human exceptionalism wrapped within passionate bias. Rather than being a matter of fact-based constructive dialogue with scientific knowledge and its respect for down-to-Earth evolutionary reality.
