Bertallanffy on The Problem of Consciousness

The thing that got me interested in psychology and philosophy was consciousness. Specifically the mystery of consciousness: How is it that our bodies can produce conscious experiences?

The great thinker Ludwig von Bertallanffy published a paper on consciousness that goes a lot further towards making sense of consciousness than anything I've ever read. He is able to make sense of the mystery of how mere arrangements of matter may give way to something as spectacular as consciousness. I want to summarize his position here.

Based on the evidence from modern science, Bertallanffy concludes that consciousness is produced by our bodies. The fact that this strikes us as such a mystery is a result of the fact that we attempt to explain conscious experience using certain products of that experience. Let me try to clarify: Consciousness is primary within our experience. Within conscious experience , we have our understanding of the world, including various causal models, etc. At the present we have reached the conclusion that "Yes, consciousness seems to be caused by the arrangement of particules making up physical organisms, even though we have no idea how this might occur." Bertallanffy argues that the reason for this is that the particles (or arrangements of them) are mental representations of the particles that actually cause consciousness (whatever the hell they are). They are the maps of the real particles.

The point can be illustrated by a heirarchy.

The primary layer is comprised of the actual "objective" structures of molecules and particules that give rise to consiocus experience. There is no way to talk about this level coherently since it is impossible to talk of things that are not perceptions. I bring it up because it is what the third layer models. This level gives birth to...

The secondary layer which is conscious experience itself. In terms of our own experience this layer is primary. It gives birth to...

Models of the primary layer of particles and molecules. These models are insufficient for explaining consciousness because they are incomplete representations of the primary level.