1 On the primary nature of consciousness Michel Bitbol CNRS / Ecole Normale Supérieure (Archives Husserl), Paris Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi, The Systems View of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 266-268 Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one’s own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere “feel” of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word. We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein’s expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one’s own experience and the others’s experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, or elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific statement : it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science. But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of “having a feel”). In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to appear as irrelevant or incidental. As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent predictors of subject’s behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of provide reports in clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the functions of consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like to be an organism performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the