Why Consciousness Points to Purpose

Abstract

Abstract The most discussed examples of conscious states involve the qualities of sensory experience: colours, sounds, smells, and tastes. But human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding. As you look at this page, for example, you don’t experience meaningless squiggles but meaningful words. We can call this aspect of consciousness ‘experiential understanding.’ This chapter explores two philosophical challenges that arise when we try to explain experiential understanding: the meaning zombie problem and the mystery of psycho-physical harmony. A meaning zombie is a hypothetic creature: a physical duplicate of a human being that has consciousness but lacks experiential understanding. Meaning zombies pose a challenge to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of experiential understanding. Given that meaning zombies would survive just as well as us despite lacking experiential understanding, why did experiential understanding evolve? Why aren’t we meaning zombies? The challenge is further deepened by the mystery of psycho-physical harmony, the puzzle of explaining why consciousness and behaviour tend to be correlated in a rationally appropriate manner (something which any evolutionary explanation of consciousness presupposes and so cannot explain). To solve these problems, the author defends pan-agentialism, the view that fundamental physical entities are conscious and disposed to respond rationally to the character of their experience. Finally, it is argued that the pan-agentialist world is one that embodies purpose at the fundamental level of reality. The ‘Digging Deeper’ section gives a Bayesian version of the argument for pan-agentialism, and responds to a few objections, including the charge that libertarian free will is not coherent.