Hardly A Problem At All?

I have been hoping to sit down and sketch out some ideas on what a 'theory of consciousness' might look like for a while now but never get around to doing so. The bottom-line, for me, is that "qualia" is the not-so-simply coordinated sensation of evolved functional life. If you bind together sensate bodies with particular organic capacities for recursion, retention (memory), association and projection (biological "imagination") – all of which can be explained with reference to neurology and functional anatomy –you get animals with a sense of self. Sapience emerges when ongoing rudimentary perceptual categorization is linked via neural reentry to emotionally coded / value-dependent memories creating a so-called “remembered present”, or emergent (and strange?) loop of referential awareness. The systemic coordination of the relevant biological components results in a dynamic and reactional neuro-functional core (see Edelman and Tononi 2000) and informational basin of attraction capable of generating what is traditionally know as internal volition or “intentionality”. This ‘wired’ complex generates structured (limiting and affording) ‘feelings’: a recursive neurocognitive simulacra of affective intensity. Thus “qualia” is what it feels like to be a particular kind of organic body. We collect and project and speculate and cope in our attempts at surviving, copulating and generally party hard via the interplay between evolved/emergent biological capacities and eco-social relations. Not much left to explain once all the details are traced out and observed in situ in my opinion.

No big deal, right? The problem is many academic careers have been maintained in making much ado about not that much. So, unfortunately, many philosophers and humanity professors still haven’t read the memo on the explanatory powers of scientific research, nor have they been motivated to develop a reasoned response to how such findings completely obliterate the past musings of their heroes.

Much later I plan on mashing together and stretching out the details of a genuine pet theory on how sentience and sapience emerge but for now I just want to note that others are also trying to get past the pseudo-debate (in my opinion) about the so-called "hard problem of consciousness":

One of the many and varied modes of post-humanism hails an end to human exceptionalism and cognition-oriented models, and instead begins from one already integrated, dynamic and connected world. There is no ‘really hard problem’ about the relation between mind and world, for the mind is an effect of relations, not something that has to act in order to represent a world to which it must subsequently relate (Flanagan 2007). It is not the case that we begin life as observing, representing beings who then become through receptivity. Rather, in the beginning is a dynamic and world-oriented receptivity from which organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject or man emerges. It is from a primary openness to the world, a primarily sensed world, that there emerges the sense of one who sees.” – Claire Colebrook [source]

The "primary openness" of all assembled bodies (see here, here and here) takes place within the field of possibility or context afforded by a myriad of actual evolved-dynamic systems: a wild, uncapture-able matrix/ecology of affective materials, intensive powers, differences and assembled networks. This 'general ecology' (wilderness of Being) is simultaneously where we come from AND where we are thrown into. Referencing the deep (and dark) context in which all experience emerges requires and AND-logic that renders this simultaneity negotiable and all talk about how 'mind' and 'world' relate a little less problematic.