A Primer for Philosophers of Mind

This book does not begin where philosophy of mind usually begins. It begins neither with qualia nor with zombies, neither with the hard problem nor with the question of whether consciousness is reducible to brain processes. It begins with the question of what life is. Proceeding reconstructively, it starts from the simplest process that maintains itself, a self-producing network of chemical reactions, and follows the consequences step by step: operational closure, endogenous production of substances, self-relation, a leap into a new causal medium, non-factorizability, valence. Each step follows necessarily from the one before it. No concept is presupposed that has not first been developed from the matter itself. At the end stands consciousness, not as a riddle to be circled, but as the structural consequence of a particular form of living organization. The hard problem does not get answered here. It dissolves, because it arose from a mistaken starting point in the first place. The book applies the same logic to the major theories of philosophy of mind, Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, Predictive Processing, and Higher Order Theories, showing where each of them starts too late. It closes by drawing out the consequence for artificial systems: not as dogma, but as precise, falsifiable criteria for what a system would actually need in order to cross the threshold of consciousness. A book for anyone who wants to know how far one can get by starting in the right place.