Does Consciousness Matter?
Distinctions — Essay 02 Derek Bronston
Being effective is about getting to the best outcome. Being efficient is getting an outcome with the least amount of resources. While both considerations are important, it is effectiveness that I am obsessed with.
Improving effectiveness requires understanding. A system cannot improve what it cannot understand. A system can be a brain, a machine, a cell, a business, or an economy. The key element they all share is information dependency. They take in signals from the world, make distinctions, and act upon what they find.
In my first essay, “The Distinction,” I examined the use of information from first principles. What does it mean to make a distinction, and what is required for that act to happen? In the end, understanding is built upon distinction, and effectiveness on understanding.
Seven years ago I began writing a book that touches on these topics. Part of that journey was spent examining how understanding works across domains: in biology, in music, in computation. This piece is a follow-up to “The Distinction.” It considers consciousness and its role in how systems understand.
People tend to think of computation as what a mathematical equation or a computer does. In current parlance it is simply the processing of information, be that in a cell, a computer, or a brain. It is the process by which a distinction is made.
In 1900, a mathematician named David Hilbert posed twenty-three problems to the mathematical community. These were ambitious, foundational problems, the kind Hilbert believed could anchor all of mathematics on solid, provable ground. Beneath the ambition lay an assumption: that mathematics itself was consistent, complete, and decidable.
To understand why those words matter, first let’s consider what a formal system actually is. A formal system is a set of rules and starting assumptions, called axioms, that let you prove things through logical steps. You might remember axioms from high school geometry. Euclid built all of geometry on just five of them. You can draw a straight line between any two points, all right angles are equal, and so on. Everything else in geometry follows from those five starting agreements.
Consistency means the system does not contradict itself. Two plus two equals four is consistent. Two plus two equals five is not. Completeness means that every true statement can be proven using the axioms available to the system.
Hilbert believed mathematics possessed both properties. In 1931, Kurt Gödel demonstrated something remarkable. By starting with the statement, “this is not provable,” he showed mathematically that any consistent system cannot be complete. In essence, if you could prove “this is not provable” to be true, then a false statement would be true. If you cannot prove it, then the system is incomplete. Consistency and completeness are incompatible. You cannot have both. This was not a minor technical result. It was a structural limit on what formal reasoning can do. Some truths live permanently beyond the reach of any such system. This is known as the incompleteness theorum.
In The Emperor’s New Mind, published in 1989, physicist Roger Penrose made a striking argument. Because mathematicians can see that Gödel’s unprovable statements are true, because they can somehow intuit them, human cognition must be doing something no algorithm can replicate. Whatever we are, it transcends computation.
I found this argument seductive. As a jazz musician it appealed to me. If Gödel showed that formal systems have limits, and mathematicians can see beyond those limits, then the mind must be more than a formal system.
While seductive to my creative side, it felt counterintuitive to my understanding of a neuron and a bit. Last summer I found myself talking about Penrose’s idea over a beer with a physicist friend of mine. He said something, simple yet profound, that I have thought about many times since. The feeling of knowing something is not the same as the act of knowing it.
You can have a powerful intuition that a mathematical statement is true. You can feel certain. That flash of insight, that moment when the answer arrives before the proof does: it feels like evidence that something non-computational is happening. It feels like the mind is doing something non-algorithmic.
Penrose collapsed consciousness and understanding into a single phenomenon. Yet a gut sense that something is true still requires derivation, step by step, through exactly the kind of logical procedure Gödel was describing. The sense of knowing, and the work of knowing are not the same thing.
Penrose observed something real: mathematicians do have intuitions about statements they have not yet proven. That experience is genuine. The question is whether the experience is doing computational work, or it is merely accompanying the computational work.
This brings us to the essential theme of this essay.
In 1995, the philosopher David Chalmers drew the sharpest version of a question that had been circulating for decades. He called it the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problem, explains how the brain processes information, integrates signals, directs attention, generates behavior. These phenomena are hard in the technical sense, but they are tractable. Given enough time and enough science, we will get there. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of that processing is accompanied by experience at all: seeing red, feeling pain, understanding sadness. Why does it not all just happen in the dark?
Nobody has answered this. Not really.
The reason it matters here is that the question splits the consciousness debate into two camps.
On one side: consciousness is emergent. It arises from sufficient physical complexity, from neurons firing in particular patterns, from information being processed in particular ways. Consciousness is a product of the physical. The brain generates it.
On the other side: consciousness is fundamental. Not a product of matter but a feature of reality at the deepest level, as basic as mass or energy. This is the view that Annaka Harris explores in Lights On, interviewing physicists and philosophers who take seriously the idea that experience is woven into the fabric of things, not layered on top. When I first encountered this position I found it oddly liberating. If consciousness is fundamental, you do not have to explain how it emerges from non-conscious matter. The question dissolves.
I spent a long time wrestling with this debate. In the end this is where I got to. It does not matter. At least not for the question of understanding.
Here is why.
Whether consciousness is fundamental or emergent, the functional requirements for understanding remain identical. Understanding occurs when a system possesses an alignment of the distinctions required to reach semantic agreement. A system that achieves this needs three things: a rule by which a distinction can be made, the ability to apply that rule, and the energy to execute it. The rule is what lets the system extract value from input.
Consciousness, whether fundamental or emergent, is not one of those three things.
This is not a denial that consciousness exists. It is not dismissing its importance for moral reasons, experiential reasons, reasons having to do with what it means to live a human life. It is a narrower claim. For the specific function of deriving value from information, consciousness may affect it, but is not intrinsically required.
Gödel showed us the limits of formal systems. Physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram introduced the principle of computational irreducibility. It states that some systems cannot be shortcut, that the only way to know what they will do is to run them and find out. Wolfram spent years cataloging simple computational rules and discovered that even the most basic rule sets can produce behavior so complex that no shortcut exists. You cannot predict the outcome without executing the computation step by step. This is not a failure of our mathematics. It is a feature of the systems themselves.
What Wolfram suggests is that understanding is hard. Not because it requires consciousness, but because the problems it has to solve are irreducibly complex. The computational work is real. The energy cost is real. The distinction-making is real.
Looking back at that conversation with my friend. He was not diminishing the experience of mathematical insight. He was locating it precisely. The feeling is real. The feeling is not the work. Those are two different claims.
Consciousness may be the most interesting thing about being human. It may be what makes a life worth living, what gives weight to moral questions, what separates mere information processing from something we recognize as a mind.
Yet it is not what makes understanding work.