Daniel Dennett has a name for cosmological theories that start with conscious will or intention and derive the material universe from some act or disposition of that will. He calls them “mind-first” theories. There are sophisticated mind-first theories (“it’s all quantum”) and unsophisticated ones (“it was The Creator what dunnit”). If I had to choose, I’d prefer the unsophisticated ones, as involving less intellectual confusion - if only by virtue of being less intellectual all round.

Here’s a comparatively sophisticated mind-first theory, as espoused by a commentor on Adam Kotsko’s weblog:

“IMHO,” when matter is fully *scientifically* accepted to be derivative of a higher-order of energy, that level itself being derivative of consciousness/perception/experience (rather than vice versa), then evolution will probably be re-understood from the vantage point of a more nuanced causality.

Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? It would surely be a comfort to know that the subjective priority of “consciousness/perception/experience” - which has an undeniable feeling of coming first for us - was somehow reflected in the greater cosmological order. One would then have to account for the separateness of individual minds, both from each other and from Mind in general, but there are a variety of metaphysical strategies that can be adapted to that task - différance at the origin, anyone? Leibniz’s monadology comes irresistably to mind.

Even the subjective priority of conscious experience is neither total nor totally consistent, however: as thinking beings, we are subject to compulsions and misfires of intentionality - to say nothing of more serious disorders, such as those occasioned by injury to the brain - that undermine the apparent priority of our perceiving, experiencing selves. Does the cosmos have an unconscious? Adam’s argument against Intelligent Design, that the vaunted Scheme of Things includes a pervasive anti-pattern of glitches, kludges, exaptations and workarounds, points in a similar direction: the biography of the cosmos is interlaced with thanatography, a pervasive inscription of the non-living, absurd and unassimilable. Mindful intention is pre-empted, and continually scandalised, by mindless process.

What Dennett offers in place of a “mind-first” theory is what one might call a “mind-last” theory, in which an organism’s ability to have conscious experiences sits at the top of a stack of prior adaptations. Dennett has to take particular pains to shake off the teleological implications of this theory, which might deceive us into thinking that consciousness is a necessary outcome of evolution, or an “emergent” property of an inevitable complexification of matter (on its way, perhaps, to some Omega point of Cosmic Consciousness). So a better name for the theory might be “mind in the middle”, where consciousness (in particular, the unitary consciousness of human organisms, as distinct from, say, an ant colony’s way of being in the world) is just one of a range of possible adaptations (of adaptations, of adaptions…), and by no means the last word in evolutionary “design”.

One of the things I like best about this theory is that it leaves the more metaphysical interpretations of quantum mechanics strictly nowhere: there is nothing intrinisically special about consciousness, and it has no necessary or even significant role to play in the “collapsing” of “waveforms”. Anything - any thing - can be an observer. Quantum events are irreducible to either “information” or “causation”, as classically understood, which is why they relate to those things in such a peculiar way: to “observe” such an event is to translate the untranslatable.