Consciousness Through a Systems Architect's Eyes

Interface language can help distinguish internal processing from information that becomes broadly available to reasoning, report and…

I approach consciousness with an occupational habit: I want to draw boxes and arrows. That habit is useful because architecture forces questions about state, boundaries, interfaces, resources and failure. It is dangerous because natural systems were not designed to respect our diagrams.

Conscious experience correlates with organized brain activity, but science still debates which mechanisms are necessary and sufficient. Theories emphasize global availability, recurrent processing, integration, prediction and other architectures.

Where does state live?

Software gives us the expectation that important state should have an owner. Natural systems often distribute state across structure, concentrations, relationships and history. A snapshot can therefore tell us less than the process that produced it.

Where are the interfaces?

Interface language can help distinguish internal processing from information that becomes broadly available to reasoning, report and action.

Engineered interfaces are declarations. Natural boundaries are often material: membranes, tissues, ecological borders, channels, gradients or social conventions. They can leak, adapt and participate in the behavior they constrain.

What is the failure model?

A software interface is presented to a separate user. Consciousness appears to be part of the organism itself; inventing an inner user simply moves the mystery inward.

Failure analysis is useful because normal operation hides assumptions. A healthy component can coexist with an unhealthy whole. A local optimization can damage the larger system. Robustness at one level can create fragility at another.

History is part of the architecture

The study of consciousness moved through introspection, behaviorism, cognitive science and neuroscience without producing one uncontested mechanistic theory.

In a designed system, legacy structure may be accidental baggage. In an evolved or historically accumulated system, legacy structure can be the reason the current architecture exists at all. The path is not documentation around the system; sometimes it is part of the system.

The zoom test

A good architectural description should survive zooming. Going down a level should reveal mechanisms capable of implementing the higher-level pattern. Going up should reveal regularities that justify discussing the larger entity in its own vocabulary.

Consciousness turns objective description back on the describer: physical systems exist for which something seems to be happening from the inside.

What must a physical system do before there is something it is like to be that system?

Reading trail

These links are starting points for the scientific and historical ideas. The systems interpretation, analogies and conclusions here are my own.