插章_三种意识假说

Interchapter: Three Mainstream Hypotheses of Consciousness: Three Old Paths and a Common Blind Spot

With the establishment of the new paradigm, looking back at the existing mainstream hypotheses of consciousness makes it easier to see what each of them has "captured," and why they find it so difficult to achieve broad convergence.

The first old path: the experience-center. It puts "how I experience the world" first, and is thus naturally skilled at description. However, once it attempts causal explanation, it faces an awkward dilemma—while the description can be infinitely detailed, the causality is hard to ground. When asked, "Which structural change leads to which capacity change?", the answers begin to float. This is not to say it is worthless; on the contrary, the experience-centered approach preserves the sharpness of the phenomenon itself. Yet, in our paradigm, experience is more like a phenomenal layer: it is important, but unsuitable as a starting point.

The second old path: the information/computation-center. It attempts to unify everything with a seemingly neutral, abstract language, thereby possessing a strong sense of formal beauty and being easily accepted by engineering intuition. However, its blind spot is also exposed here: abstraction often flattens life-like constraints. One can write a system as "processing information," but it is difficult to deduce from this whether it must have metabolism, whether it must face resource scarcity, or whether it must maintain itself in real time. Information and computation certainly belong to the toolbox of life and mind, but in our paradigm, they can only attain causal status within structure and closed loops, rather than replacing structure itself to become the first cause.

The third old path: the cognitive function-center. It is closer to the conventional approach of psychology and experimental science, excelling at using tasks, performance, modules, and mechanisms to tell the story of what consciousness "does." Its contribution lies in pulling the discussion toward operational experimental questions; its risk lies in quietly shrinking consciousness into "the name of certain high-level functions." Consequently, it is easy to inadvertently lock consciousness near "reporting," "reflection," "reasoning," and "language," while pushing plants, infants, anesthesia, and pathological materials to the periphery, as if they were merely exceptions that are "not similar enough."

The common blind spot of the three old paths can be summarized in one sentence: they all sever consciousness from the continuum of life at some point—either within experiential vocabulary, abstract computation, or high-order functions. Once severed, they are of course self-consistent individually, but they are also rendered difficult to converge for the same reason.

What the structural evolutionary paradigm of the biological agency of consciousness does is to shift the cut back to the interior of life: taking metabolism-self-maintenance as the minimal foundation, structural evolution and organizational forms as the source of differences, and agency as the causal core. Thus, experience is no longer negated but repositioned; information and function are no longer banished but restored to their proper places.