The Intrinsic Value of Consciousness

Why consciousness is probably not intrinsically valuable

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading - treading - till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum -

Kept beating - beating - till I thought

My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race,

Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing - then -

— Emily Dickinson

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There are two types of value: intrinsic and instrumental. Something is intrinsically valuable when it’s valuable in itself—desirable for its own sake. The most uncontroversial example is pleasure. Other, more controversial examples include: knowledge, achievement, love, earned virtue, just punishments, and so on.

Something is instrumentally valuable, in contrast, if it’s only valuable as a means to an end. A good example is money. Obviously, bank notes have no value in and of themselves. Their value consists in the fact that they help us achieve other, derivative goods—status, security, Bentham’s Newsletter subscriptions, and the like.

What is the value of consciousness? Consciousness is something we’re all familiar with. If you’re reading this article but you aren’t conscious, it probably isn’t for you. If you’ve been reading up to here, though, I’ll assume you are conscious and that the title drew you in. Maybe you’re already interested in the question, or—more likely—you don’t care yet, but are open to being interested. If that’s you, read on.

I. Instrumental Value

Let’s start with instrumental value. If intrinsic value were a banjo player, the mind would be its instrument: nearly all the things that philosophers offer up as candidates for Things With Intrinsic Value—pleasure, love, friendship, virtue—depend, arguably, on conscious minds to exist. Perhaps there are intrinsically valuable things that aren’t conscious (in On the Intrinsic Value of Everything, for example, Scott Davison defends the surprising view that inanimate matter is intrinsically valuable.) Still, if you believe in intrinsic value at all, as I do, then you’ll think at least many of the most intrinsically valuable things depend on consciousness. So, insofar as consciousness is a pre-requisite for a whole panoply of valuable things—making friends, falling in love, feeling happy, witnessing beauty, acting virtuously, etc.—consciousness is instrumentally valuable.

II. Intrinsic Axiological Value

Something is intrinsically valuable when it’s valuable in itself and desirable for its own sake. That in mind, what value does the consciousness itself have, if any?

The only good way philosophers have come up with for you to test whether something, call it X, is intrinsically valuable is—in effect—to imagine a world where X exists, imagine an otherwise identical world where it doesn’t, and then ask yourself: “Would the world with X in it seems intuitively better, axiologically, than the world without X?”

(“Axiology”, btw, is the subfield of philosophy that thinks about questions of value: what things are valuable, to what degree are they valuable, and why. Sometimes, “axiological value” is used to pick out aesthetic value on top of just moral value. Here, I use “axiological value” to refer to moral value but not aesthetic value. I’ll cover aesthetic value in a moment.)

In his paper “Is Consciousness Intrinsically Valuable?”, Andrew Y. Lee asks us to imagine the following two worlds:

Consider two worlds that are empty save for a single creature inhabiting each world. In the first world, the creature has a maximally simple conscious experience that lacks any valence. Perhaps, for example, the creature has an experience of slight brightness. The creature’s experience is exhausted by this sparse phenomenology. In the second world, the creature is not conscious at all. For example, we might suppose that in the second world, the creature is constantly in a dreamless sleep for the entire duration of its existence. We can stipulate that the two worlds are as similar as possible without violating the difference in consciousness between the two creatures.

Intuitions may differ, but by my lights—pun intended—the world full of conscious creatures doesn’t seem more axiologically valuable than the world full of unconscious creatures. For that reason, I’m inclined to think consciousness isn’t intrinsically valuable. Of itself, it adds no goodness to the world. Put another way: if you’re God, and have the choice of creating either the first world or the second, you have no moral reason to choose one over the other.

If you have the opposite intuition, that might mean you should think consciousness is intrinsically valuable, contrary to what I’m saying.

But reader beware: even if the world with consciousness in it seems more valuable in some sense—which, I admit, is how it seems to me—that doesn’t mean the world is more axiologically valuable. Plausibly, what our intuitions are responding to there is the superior aesthetic value of a world with consciousness to a world without it.

III. The Aesthetic Value of Consciousness

Does consciousness have aesthetic value? Consider again Lee’s example of a the two worlds—one with consciousness, one without. Intuitively, at least to my mind, there’s something more beautiful about the world with consciousness—even though it’s only consciousness of light—than the world devoid of it.

Here is a more sophisticated argument for that view. In a forthcoming paper, Takuya Niikawa defends the view that consciousness is sublime. That is: consciousness is beautiful in a way that inspires wonder, awe, and veneration.

When an interviewer asked him, “What inspires you in life?”, Vladimir Nabokov replied:

“Its complete unreality; the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being; the mind's hopeless inability to cope with its own essence and sense”.

There are many facts about consciousness that seem to inspire this kind of awe—its mystery, its internal coherence, its complexity, etc.—and most of us have occasionally be enraptured by it. And just as something’s being feared is evidence of its being fearsome, the fact that consciousness tends to inspire aesthetic awe is evidence for its being sublimely beautiful.

I have no worked out view of what it means to say that something is beautiful. The debate between aesthetic realists and aesthetic anti-realists is thorny, and I don’t take a view. Whatever the truth, the fact that consciousness at least seems to be sublime in the relevant sense is enough for my purposes. Given that consciousness at least seems aesthetically valuable (whether or not this seeming picks out an objective, mind-independent aesthetic property of consciousness), I think that’s enough to account for the intuition, if one has it, that the world with consciousness in it is in some way more valuable than the world without it. We needn’t think consciousness has any intrinsic moral value at all.