How does the inner space of conscious experience relate to the outer world that exists in between us? This is known as the “Mind-Body Problem”, or the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

Many perspectives on this relationship have been offered throughout the ages, including:

Idealism: Everything is consciousness. Matter is merely how consciousness appears from the outside.

Panpsychism: Everything is conscious. Consciousness and matter are equally fundamental, they are two aspects of reality.

Biopsychism: All living systems are conscious. The conscious mind is an emergent, systems-level feature of matter when it constitutes a living system.

Zoopsychism: Animals with nervous systems are conscious. A complex computational property of nervous systems, such as self-modelling, creates a psychological subject that can interrogate internal and external states that are represented by the system.

Our research explores the plausibility of these individual positions and attempts to contrast and synthesise insights from these different perspectives into an overarching framework.

Publications:

The living mirror theory of consciousness (2020) Journal of Consciousness Studies

Authors: James E Cooke

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2020/00000027/f0020009/art00006

An explanatory gap exists between physics and experience, raising the hard problem of consciousness: why are certain physical systems associated with an experience of an external world from an internal perspective? The living mirror theory holds that consciousness can be understood as arising from the computational interaction between a living system and its environment that is required for the organism's existence and survival. Maintaining a boundary that protects the system against destructive forces requires an interaction between the organism and its outside world that can be cast in terms of Bayesian inference. The living mirror theory holds that this computational interaction results in statistical properties of the material world that are, in the absence of life, only implicit, becoming explicit in informational terms. This is held to give rise to the beliefs in qualities that constitute consciousness. Consciousness is therefore a necessary feature of all living systems as, in a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, survival depends on the construction of beliefs regarding the potentially destructive forces in the outside world. From this perspective, consciousness is shown to be not a property of the brain in particular but instead to be a necessary feature of the life process itself.

What Is Consciousness? Integrated Information vs. Inference (2020) Entropy

Authors: James E Cooke

https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/23/8/1032

Any successful naturalistic account of consciousness must state what consciousness is, in terms that are compatible with the rest of our naturalistic descriptions of the world. Integrated Information Theory represents a pioneering attempt to do just this. This theory accounts for the core features of consciousness by holding that there is an equivalence between the phenomenal experience associated with a system and its intrinsic causal power. The proposal, however, fails to provide insight into the qualitative character of consciousness and, as a result of its proposed equivalence between consciousness and purely internal dynamics, into the intentional character of conscious perception. In recent years, an alternate group of theories has been proposed that claims consciousness to be equivalent to certain forms of inference. One such theory is the Living Mirror theory, which holds consciousness to be a form of inference performed by all living systems. The proposal of consciousness as inference overcomes the shortcomings of Integrated Information Theory, particularly in the case of conscious perception. A synthesis of these two perspectives can be reached by appreciating that conscious living systems are self-organising in nature. This mode of organization requires them to have a high level of integration. From this perspective, we can understand consciousness as being dependent on a system possessing non-trivial amounts of integrated information while holding that the process of inference performed by the system is the fact of consciousness itself.