What is it like for matter to matter?

Abstract

Consciousness research often asks where, when, or under what conditions neural processing becomes conscious. Here I introduce the Distributed Architecture of Valenced Evaluation (DAVE), which starts from a different premise. Nervous systems continuously represent states in terms of what those states imply for the organism, and these evaluations are physically instantiated in dispositions that bias bodily, attentional, predictive, and action systems. DAVE proposes that, where such organism-relative evaluation is embedded in the embodied dynamics through which a represented state can alter the organism, its evaluative character is already minimally phenomenal. Each such evaluative event constitutes a micro-quale: not a miniature conscious subject or an independently experienced percept, but a local phenomenal contribution to the experience of the organism. Recurrent interaction among many micro-qualia forms the richly differentiated, context-sensitive, and apparently unified phenomenal tapestry familiar in human experience. Attention, task demands, working memory, and self-representation selectively amplify, stabilize, and organize parts of this tapestry, producing increasingly integrated, accessible, and self-related forms of experience. Because introspection presents the integrated tapestry rather than its constituent evaluative events, phenomenal character may appear to be an additional property beyond the physical organization that constitutes it. This conception of phenomenal character makes the explanatory gap seem inevitable. DAVE does not solve the hard problem by discovering a mechanism that converts nonphenomenal processing into phenomenality; it attempts to dissolve the need for such a conversion by identifying minimal phenomenal character with organism-relative evaluative disposition itself.