What Would Non-Consciousness Have Looked Like?

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” 

His friend: “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going around the Earth.” 

Wittgenstein: “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”

One of the great questions in philosophy (as well as neuroscience) is why it feels like something to be us; why do we experience consciousness? While there’s a great deal to say on that topic, in this post we’ll instead attempt to flip the question on its head and examine what a world might look like in which it did not feel like anything to be us (hopefully in the process sparking some intuitions about this world we do find ourselves conscious in). 

The basis premise goes as follows:

1. We (our brains and bodies) are made up of cells.
2. These cells are made up of particles which interact according to the laws of physics (as do all other particles of our world).
3. These interactions do not require consciousness, and so we can imagine a world exactly the same as our own, simply without consciousness.

Following that line of logic, we end up with a world just like our current one, where you and I (and all others) still exist, but where it doesn’t feel like anything to be us. “Pain”, “happiness”, “love”, and “hate” all still exist; for example, touching a hot stove would still result in electrical signals being sent from “your” finger to “your” brain, at which point the circuitry of “your” brain would result in signals being sent back which would move “your” hand away. However, there’s no consciousness of the pain, or the subsequent movement, or of any of the other feelings listed above. Put differently, “the lights are on but no one’s home”. 

Interestingly, as this other world is the exact same (just without consciousness), “I” still write this post and “you” still read it, though neither of us consciously experience those activities. The post gets written because specific neurons of “mine” fire action potentials which activate other neurons, and the circuitry of this neural network is such that concepts like “I”, “consciousness”, “counterfactual”, and “Wittgenstein” are “represented” and incorporated into the writing (which happens as a result of neurons firing in such a way as to move “my” body’s fingers to type on a keyboard). The post gets read because photons strike photoreceptors which generate action potentials in “your” neural network, and these potentials in turn drive others which, in concert, “represent” concepts in the network. As laid out above, taking consciousness out of the world does not change the interactions of the particles, and accordingly “our” experiences unfold in exactly the same manner as today (in our current world).

We end up with this strange situation where “you” and “I” can both talk about how it feels like something to be us, and can both marvel at how interesting it is that we have consciousness (vs. the seemingly more simple alternative of not having it). “You” and “I” can write about what worlds without consciousness might look like, and grapple with the difficult questions that arise when something very much like consciousness still seems to arise. These questions may even prompt us to take a different approach to consciousness – one where, rather than being “something extra” that can be subtracted, it is simply self-representation (in sufficiently complex systems). 

Indeed, it seems “you” and “I” could have quite an interesting discourse on these topics in this other world; what a shame that no one would be around for it to feel like something to…