Consciousness first

The ultimate good and how we can navigate the near-term future

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

What is the nature of reality? How should we choose to live and act?

When I started writing this blog, my aim was to figure out what I think about these questions. Now, I finally think I’ve groped around enough to build a basis for my worldview. In this post I want to try to articulate it, and layout some ideas I plan to explore further in future writing.

If I were to state it simply, it’s that consciousness is both real and the root of all value.

I’ve found that unpacking this can lead to insight and clarity. It points to the same things as the great epics, in their tales of good vs evil and love vs hate. It’s the principle that is revealed by a true work of art. It’s an idea that can be rationally argued for, but also comes with its own open-hearted gnosis.

The insight into the root of all value

One of the things that has led me here is a consistent meditation practice. If you continue to pay close attention to experience, it starts to become clear that, although experiences have a deep and varied structure, there are certain regularities that keep cropping up.

Of these regularities, one of the most significant is that all positive experiences have a similar character. Underneath the stream of thought particular to any enjoyable experience, there’s a pure feeling with a singular flavour. It’s there when you are joyful, when you are in love, or when you finally crack a difficult problem. It’s this positive feeling that lets you know you are going in the right direction, giving you a reason to live.

This isn’t easy to see at first. There seems to be something in the human condition that hides it from us. But, by paying enough attention to what’s actually going on in experience, there are other ways to get at this insight.

Consider why you do anything at all. What is it that makes your life worthwhile? Why do you get out of bed in the morning, to act and work to change the world? Your first answer to this is probably a story that you tell yourself about your values and what you care about. Maybe it’s your love for others, or an ideal you believe in.

But, try to look a bit deeper into what’s going on when you tell yourself this story. For it to have power, it must be coming with a meaning attached. If you pay attention and trace back how this meaning arises, you will find it comes with positive feelings and emotions associated to it. It’s these feelings that provides life with value, not the narrative you tell yourself.

Now, this isn’t meant to sound reductionist or nihilistic. It’s not that the stories we tell ourselves about our relationships with others and our sense of belonging in the world aren’t important — they are a deep and intrinsic part of being human. But, they are specific to being human. The value present in positive conscious experiences transcends this. It’s more fundamental than the particularities of the human experience.

Put briefly, when something is good, it’s because it’s invoking conscious experiences with positive valence. Conversely, when something is bad, it is has to cause negative valence. All value must derive from valenced consciousness, if it were even possible to cut something out of the web of experience, it wouldn’t make any sense to value it.

The reality of consciousness

This worldview doesn't rely on a particular theory of consciousness to be true, but it does rely on a belief that consciousness exists. Certain “illusionists” deny this, explaining consciousness away as an introspective illusion. While this argument can have its merits, I think it misses something key about how consciousness is intrinsically entwined with being. The only way anything can be realised is if there is an experience of it — without experience, it isn’t even possible to conceive of anything existing.

This observation is enough to justify the ideas I want to present in this post. But, I think it can be useful to consider another couple of properties consciousness should have, when reasoned about from the perspective of a physicist. As it appears both self-contained and unitary, the fact that something is conscious shouldn’t depend on the way you measure it. This implies that:

1. Consciousness should be frame-independent. Any theory that predicts whether something is conscious shouldn’t depend on where you are observing it from, or how fast you are going. It should be robust to Lorentz transformations.

2. Deciding whether something is conscious should be independent of the particular world-model you are using. It is often thought that consciousness could emerge from specific types of information processing, the kind that goes on in the brain for example. However, any physical system can be thought of as an information processing system — thunderstorms, whirlpools, rocks, brains. Whether this information processing is “meaningful” depends on the observer interpreting it, not anything special about the processing in itself. If the definition of information processing is so slippery, it seems unlikely to be a deciding factor in whether consciousness arises. At most, it can say something about the particular contents of consciousness.

Photo by Kaleb Dortono on Unsplash

These two principles make me less keen on functional or computational theories of consciousness. Instead, I favour panpsychist or idealist views. I’m drawn to the thought that the universe is in some way conscious, with individuation of different observers occurring through frame-independent dissociative boundaries. This kind of thing could occur through topological pockets in the electro-magnetic field, for example. Variations of this view that I’m partial to are argued for from different angles by Bernardo Kastrup and the Qualia Research Institute, and they seem to accommodate the core principles described above.

Now I’ve laid my metaphysical cards out on the table, I don’t want to put people off who think these ideas seem a bit exotic and fanciful. I don’t actually think the exact mechanics of how a theory of consciousness works matters for most of the ethical conclusions I draw in this blog. But, I do think it is undeniable that consciousness exists as a core property of the universe and presents a deep and profound mystery. It may even end up being equivalent to the question of why anything exists at all.

Then what leads to suffering?

If being and consciousness are so closely linked, and value itself derives from consciousness, it suggests that the universe actually has value built into it.

But, this then begs the question: what is it that leads to suffering? If the universe itself “prefers” positive conscious experience, why does it allow for negative valence at all? Why should the state-space of the universe include something inherently bad?

This is a very profound question, which can only be superficially addressed here. But, at least from the perspective of our own existence, there is a compelling explanation.

Life is under enormous pressure to replicate itself, almost by definition. Any organism that doesn’t is quickly ejected from the chain of existence, leaving the most successful replicators to dominate. The mechanism behind this is clearly laid out in Darwin’s model of evolution by natural selection.

Interestingly, genetic replicators also seems to recruit conscious experience to help them in their goal. There is no deep scientific understanding as to why this may be the case, but empirically it seems like it could be contributing novel methods of computation, allowing organisms to model and act in their environment with great efficiency. In this framing, suffering and pleasure act as a potent signals to move away or towards particular states.

Unfortunately, replicators that host consciousness in this way aren’t always motivated by the the maximisation of valence through the creation of beautiful conscious experiences. If creating more suffering is useful for replication, all the worse for the consciousness trapped in replication cycles — staying in a high valence attractor for too long isn’t usually conducive to further replication.

Photo by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash

This tension between what consciousness and replicators want has an awful lot of explanatory power. It can help to explain why suffering might exist and how we can make a world that reduces it. It also gives us a way to think about how we should act, we need to always be careful to put ourselves on the side of team consciousness, not team replicator.

This idea was originally brought to my attention in this great post by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson. The more I think about it, the more this idea goes to the heart of what i’m trying to get at in this blog. Fully unpacking its implications can’t be achieved in one post, but I’ll start by outlining some of the ways it can generate an understanding of the most important issues facing humanity. I want to explore how we should reevaluate things when we start to really put consciousness first.

Consciousness vs replicators mirrors good vs evil

When you start to think in terms of the dichotomy of consciousness vs replicators, you may notice that lots of the issues in the world can be put down to the domination of replicator dynamics over conscious experience.

Take economic growth, for example. When distributed evenly, it serves consciousness by enriching many beings. However, as replicator dynamics start to take effect, wealth starts to get more concentrated to the top. Making money becomes an end in itself, and growth extends cancerously out into the environment, destroying everything for no reason other than self-propagation.

In fact, many evils seems to arise from self-replication being privileged over consciousness. Disease is caused by microorganisms replicating themselves without heed, while war is caused by nations doing the same.

These replicator dynamics are only notable by their effects on the physical world. Positive conscious experience, on the other hand, justifies itself on its own terms. There is something undeniably good in a beautiful symphony or a blissful meditation, without the need for a measurable outcome¹. Valence does seem to be used by evolution to drive living beings to act in a way conducive to replication — through the enjoyment of a good meal, or sex. But, it doesn’t need to cause changes in the external world to be worthwhile.

The path to the ultimate good comes through serving consciousness, without falling into the traps of incessant replication. In fact, the archetypes of evil — self-centred pursuit of power, the exploitation of others for one’s own gain and the instrumentalisation of suffering — seem eerily close to the dark forces of unchecked replication. Whereas archetypically good things — selfless acts of love, shared joy and beauty — come from prioritising global consciousness above other concerns. Sure, there are skilful ways in which self-propagating dynamics can be used, but they should always be kept in check to serve a higher purpose.

These ideas can be extrapolated out to dizzying post-human utopias, such as those imagined by David Pearce and other transhumanists. But, they are also very relevant to the world we are living in now. They can start to provide insights into the importance of art, how we should navigate the near-term technological future, and the deepest mystical experiences.

Art as the most noble pursuit of consciousness

Once you accept that exploring positive conscious experience is the highest good, art takes on a whole new significance. Artists can be thought of as “Qualia Engineers”, carving out niches in a landscape of beauty and meaning.

This flips the modern capitalist attitude to art on its head — it is no longer just a tool for value creation, but something justified for its own sake. Art and other pursuits of beauty or joy change from being a frivolous way to pass your time and entertain yourself, to the most important of human endeavours.

The consciousness first mentality also reveals something about how art is made. Any artist practicing their craft quickly learns to follow their feeling, not their thoughts. In this act, they are learning to follow gradients in the landscape of conscious valence, so as to end up in a place that can invoke similar conscious feelings in others. Art produced in this way is inescapably a product of consciousness. Committing our resources to this kind of pursuit is the highest manifestation of the victory of consciousness over replication

Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over The Rhone

The threat from Artificial Intelligence

Recent technological advances have made this more pertinent than ever. We’re going to find ourselves increasingly surrounded by intelligent machines, which will get better and better at mimicking conscious minds. But, as modern AI systems are implemented in large distributed silicon processing architectures, I think it’s very unlikely that they will wake up. They don’t obey the two properties of consciousness outlined above, and bear very little physical resemblance to the only entities we know are conscious. If they are, at best it’ll be fragmented and completely alien². Despite this, AI will clearly get very good at manipulating the physical world, potentially lending a huge advantage to replicator dynamics that disregard conscious valence.

Consider the incoming deluge of automated art and writing produced by AIs that are essentially huge soups of linear algebra. None of these algorithms have an intrinsic connection to valence. Instead, AI systems can only regurgitate echoes of past experiences once expressed by a human, and subsequently consumed in a mechanistic training process. We are at risk of drowning in a stimulating, but ultimately meaningless, noise. Distracted into oblivion by our creations.

I still think there is a window of opportunity before we are overwhelmed though. Bertrand Russell once observed that “Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.” It seems modern AI is getting very good at the second type, while the first type remains more challenging — we’ve been promised self-driving cars and home assistance robots for many years, with little apparent progress.

While we still have the advantage in manipulating the physical world, we should work to build aligned machines that understand the primacy of a consciousness first perspective. We need to keep valuing genuine emotional experiences and the exploration of positive valence, prioritising the well-being and flourishing of conscious beings over the relentless drive for replication.

The insight into no-self

There is a final, more esoteric way to gain a personal insight into the the relationship between consciousness and replicators — through the Buddhist concept of no-self. Spending enough time meditating and observing the way experience is constructed can reveal that there is no permanent essence of self. Instead, there is only an ever-changing process of self-construction.

This observation turns out to be of deep importance. By recognising that the self is merely an idea held within consciousness and not a concrete entity, we can shift from identifying with this illusion, to identifying as consciousness itself. In fact, the idea of a self usually subtly pushes us towards undesirable replicator behaviour. Changing the way we conceive of who we are can result in a profound change in the way we inhabit the world. When we can genuinely and intuitively identify with all conscious beings, compassion and love arises spontaneously and naturally.

Perhaps enlightenment can even be understood as the embodied realisation of the necessity of putting consciousness first, by transcending the limitations imposed by our identification with a replicator.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

The unknowable and all we need to know

One of the most curious properties of consciousness, is that it may be in principle impossible to know if anyone or anything other than yourself possesses it. The only way to really be sure is to have an experience, which is something inherently personal. We may never know which other beings in the universe are conscious. We will never definitively prove if our AI has ever woken up, or if there’s something it’s like to be a fish, or a neutron star. All we can know is what we’re experiencing now and its valence.

But, this is enough to get us a long way. There is no need to worry about the meaning of life. Instead, the answer lies in the valence of our conscious experiences, and the experiences of the other conscious beings around us.

So, although replicators possess an inherent advantage, prioritising consciousness is essential for achieving greater harmony and well-being. This has always been evident to the great sages, but as humanity's technological power increases, it’s becoming increasingly crucial that we take it seriously. We must recognise that we all share something intrinsic to the universe — something fundamentally important, the source of all meaning and value. To ensure that good prevails over the evil arising from misguided replication, we must strive to put consciousness first.

1. Some people argue that things only feel good because they serve an evolutionary purpose, a reward in a reinforcement learning process. But, although they are correlated, we actually observe that there’s a separation from liking and wanting, which isn’t something you would expect if this were the case. It’s possible to want to do things that aren’t enjoyable, even in the longterm. Also, some super pleasurable things, such as the meditative Jhanas, don’t lead to addictive behaviour at all.

2. If you think a large language model — or any other sophisticated AI system — may be conscious, spend some time reflecting on what actually goes on in your conscious experience when you’re carrying out a linguistic task. You’ll probably notice that you hear or see words in your mind’s eye, along with associated pictures and concepts. Considering an LLM has no sensory apparatus, there is no way it could have a similar experience.