A hypothesis about consciousness

[Won2blv]

I have this idea about how self-consciousness happened. Let me know where my logic is faulty and give me a chance to respond. And any time I use the word theory its purely the colloquial use of the word. Thanks


We are the product of Evolution. I use the capital "E" because I use it in that sentence as an all encompassing word. Not just biological but also cosmological. Sure, we don't know everything about physics, but we can observe that stars, planets, galaxies and everything else in the universe had its own kind of evolution.

On earth we had a new kind of evolution, of the biological nature. For a billion years or so, we were just single celled organisms. Then, at some point, we started becoming more than just an amoeba. Our biological adaptation became more and more sophisticated. We crawled out of the ocean, and then started evolving on dry land.

I am sure that many would agree that the earliest brain was a key to life being able to adapt more effectively to its surroundings. There was always this raw survival mentality and the brain made it easier to adapt.

I believe that animals developed consciousness at very early stage in evolution. It just was a consciousness that worked on auto-pilot. It didn't think about decisions, it only reacted. For millennia after millennia, the largest and most powerful forms of life became the most likely to survive. This, mixed with an atmosphere that was more rich in oxygen, kept the large, powerful, and sometimes vicious animals at the top of the food chain.

Yes, there were still smaller and maybe even more gentler species, but they had a survival technique that was more focussed on different ways to avoid the big guys rather than try to beat them. Some evolved to be faster, some were more agile, some were smarter, and everything in between.

It was after 2 mass extinctions that there was a huge game changer. There was ecological like peace time.

The evolutionary line that was becoming smarter, became more and more sophisticated in its survival techniques. It used similar evolutionary advancements that many animals implemented but it was able to try and consciously perfect them. Like living in herds, making tools, and building things. All the while, the brain is doing this on an autopilot that is just focussed on being able to survive.

So the brain had the ability to create, but it only could create new things that were tangible outside of the brain, like rudimentary tools. All of the energy of the brains was focussed on these survival techniques and the brain never diverted energy to itself. This is how I believe sleep evolved, it was a necessary function that allowed the brain to recoup after expending all of its energy making sure that the body functions correctly and efficiently.

Somewhere along the way though, the herds of early human ancestors began to get more and more comfortable. The brain had evolved a highly efficient system where almost all of the necessary survival adaptations worked in their very own autopilot. It had to use less and less energy on just pure raw survival. The brain was able to divert energy to itself for the first time.

When this happened, it was like the pilot woke up from his nap and jumped back into the cockpit. For the first time in evolutionary history, the brain realized that it could create something so much more useful than any tool, it could create its own thoughts.

Of course, like all evolutionary advancements, this early self-consciousness was also very rudimentary. The pilot was in the cockpit, but it still had every intention of surviving. So it was almost like the pilot actually didn't know how to fly, but was learning to fly by just sitting in the cock pit while the autopilot was still on. The more time in the cockpit, the more comfortable the pilot felt to take more control.

This advancement in cognitive thinking ability sped up the evolution of these intelligent humanoid like creatures. They grew closer in their communities. They were even able to start passing time with entertainment. They created stories and drew pictures. They even developed a sense of humor among other evolutionary oddities. My theory on humor is that we are just observing an absurdity. Look at a child, they laugh when you play peek-a-boo. Its a gut reaction to a perceived absurdity. It also can eventually lead to the baby getting scared and crying, I think because the little baby brain hasn't developed enough to understand that the absurdity that they experienced is not real.

Basically, I am saying that consciousness was always hardwired in. It just took our brains being able to relax a bit from the arms race, that was evolution for billions of years, and focus more on its own ability to make decisions based off of predictions. Consciousness was not an instantaneous eureka moment but another slow moving evolutionary advancement. As we became more and more comfortable with our own thoughts, we started creating more and more ideas. This was the turning point that made us fully self-conscious

[ignoramus]

Sounds reasonable.

As the mind got more evolved and complex, it was able to take itself off autopilot ...
So basically consciousness is just the ability for an animal to have the mental capacity to override it's own innate subconsciousness.
Animal logic!

[bennyboy]

Good ideas, but they are not original to you for the most part.

[chimp3]

@won2blv: You are using the term "fully self conscious' but does this describe a theory of mind? Humans are not the only animal to exhibit this awareness. Chimpanzees also have this trait. So there was probably not any " Eureka" moment but a process of brain building over millions of years.

[Won2blv]

Good ideas, but they are not original to you for the most part.

I honestly don't expect anyone to take my word for this but I concocted all of this yesterday. Then after I got excoriated on Reddit, I did some googling and found this article from a Princeton professor https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ed/485558/

He is uh... a little more qualified at explaining it

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@won2blv: You are using the term "fully self conscious' but does this describe a theory of mind? Humans are not the only animal to exhibit this awareness. Chimpanzees also have this trait. So there was probably not any " Eureka" moment but a process of brain building over millions of years.

I think that it took billions of years for very simple organisms to evolve brains. Brains and functions of the brains, like all evolutionary advances, started out as very rudimentary in structure and ability. I believe brains popped up because of an advantage of having memories. Memories allowed for organisms to process information and in turn, make decisions.

So as I said in the post, I believe that we have had consciousness for millions of years. All animals with brains are conscious. Our branch of the tree though, strengthened that muscle, and it only was able to because of the 2 massive extinctions in the last 50 million years. Otherwise, our brains, would by necessity, never develop fast enough because it was too deadly to not focus merely on physical advancements.

It could explain also why some animals have amazing hearing, amazing smell, and other crazy abilities that amaze humans. The consciousness of those animals kept leading them in the direction of their strengths.

So I know this is a drawn out answer, but I am not saying that humans are unique in consciousness, just that they're unique in being able to create intangible thoughts.

Monkeys have also shown an ability to make tools, but I would argue that it is only because the creation is tangible and testable to the outer body. A monkey does not have the idea to make a hammer, but it does need to crack open a shell so it tests different ways and then remembers the best one.

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Sounds reasonable.

As the mind got more evolved and complex, it was able to take itself off autopilot ...
So basically consciousness is just the ability for an animal to have the mental capacity to override it's own innate subconsciousness.
Animal logic!

Yeah exactly, I think of our brains as manufacturing plants. For millions of years, that plant had one basic product, survival. But human brains were able to get so efficient at the survival part, that it upgraded to automation to run the survival part of its brain. So whats a manufacturing plant to do when they have their bread and butter working away, ensuring them that they keep producing their most important product? Venture Capitalism.

The brain became like a venture capitalist. Taking more risk, looking for information not previously known, and inventing thoughts that could be tested. I mean for every one of those to be as simple and rudimentary as possible. Like just simply seeing mud soften and then harden, it would be the first minor observation that would eventually lead to more and more advanced building material

[bennyboy]

Good ideas, but they are not original to you for the most part.

I honestly don't expect anyone to take my word for this but I concocted all of this yesterday. Then after I got excoriated on Reddit, I did some googling and found this article from a Princeton professor https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ed/485558/

He is uh... a little more qualified at explaining it

Hey, you are learning and thinking. I wouldn't want to discourage that!

I'd ask you to consider the philosophical problems of consciousness as well-- how is it that ANY physical system, evolved or otherwise, can have subjective experience? It's easy to see how the brain would evolve in species, how it would process data in more and more complex ways-- but why would the organism actually have the experience of red as "red" for example?

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Monkeys have also shown an ability to make tools, but I would argue that it is only because the creation is tangible and testable to the outer body. A monkey does not have the idea to make a hammer, but it does need to crack open a shell so it tests different ways and then remembers the best one.

Again, I'd suggest that google and scientific papers will show that many animals clearly DO have the ability to symbolize and to develop creative responses to their environment. I believe octopuses, parrots, and several other animals are capable of fairly high level thought.

[Won2blv]

[/quote]
Again, I'd suggest that google and scientific papers will show that many animals clearly DO have the ability to symbolize and to develop creative responses to their environment.  I believe octopuses, parrots, and several other animals are capable of fairly high level  thought.
[/quote]

I am not discounting other animals ability to having varying degrees of conscious thoughts. I am saying that the big difference, is that they can only narrowly conceptualize based off of what they see, feel, smell, hear, and taste. When they create, they're very rudimentary creations. The level of self-piloting in their conscious, is about equal to the level of sophistication of their creations. When humans evolved to the point of knowing that the possibilities were endless, that is when the brain took a huge leap forward in evolution.

[The Grand Nudger]

We also conceptualize based upon what we see, feel, smell, hear and taste.,..evcen when we attempt to describe or address things we take to be "beyond" such mundane concerns.  Take, for example, the invisible red thread of asian myth.  

The thing that connected us all, spiritually, to the all..as it were....was something familiar to weavers...string. It was invisible, but apparently red.  Our imaginations aren't quite as unbounded as some seem to think. The possibilities, when you actually consider what it is any given person is conceptualizing, are all mundane and familiar. This isn;t to say that we haven;t got something™ that other animals don;t have...but it may be quantitative, not qualitative..in difference.

[emjay]

I just went for a walk today, trying to be mindfully aware of my surroundings... while listening to my MP3 player... and I noticed that it's impossible to separate the sound from the meaning... once you know it... or the things you see, from what they are. But, if you watch a foreign TV programme in a language you don't understand, then it really is just sound with no meaning. So I think consciousness is all about understanding... as soon as its contents are understood... then that understanding becomes somewhat inseparable from the qualia. I don't mean understanding in the sense of knowing the causes (necessarily) but understanding in the sense of becoming familiar with an environment, such that you have expectations about it... ie in a place you know where to go, and in music, you can predict the next part of it. And reason, I'd guess, is an extension of this process. But I'd never really thought of it like this before... that just the actual qualia represents understanding - in the sense that you can't separate the meaning from it - unless it's not known... something new... then you either passively come to expect it, and/or your reason comes in and and tries to make sense of it... to fit it into the overall understanding.

[Won2blv]

I just went for a walk today, trying to be mindfully aware of my surroundings... while listening to my MP3 player... and I noticed that it's impossible to separate the sound from the meaning... once you know it... or the things you see, from what they are. But, if you watch a foreign TV programme in a language you don't understand, then it really is just sound with no meaning. So I think consciousness is all about understanding... as soon as its contents are understood... then that understanding becomes somewhat inseparable from the qualia. I don't mean understanding in the sense of knowing the causes (necessarily) but understanding in the sense of becoming familiar with an environment, such that you have expectations about it... ie in a place you know where to go, and in music, you can predict the next part of it. And reason, I'd guess, is an extension of this process. But I'd never really thought of it like this before... that just the actual qualia represents understanding - in the sense that you can't separate the meaning from it - unless it's not known... something new... then you either passively come to expect it, and/or your reason comes in and and tries to make sense of it... to fit it into the overall understanding.

Yeah I see what you're saying.

I just think that what humans have wrong about their intelligence and consciousness, is that, we believe that our consciousness is a unique accident. When in reality, consciousness is just another boring advancement of evolution that started out with a very basic evolutionary advantage, that if you can find more efficient ways to survive, then you can expand your survival adaptations to more areas.

When you look at organisms that have little cognitive ability, they only know how to react to their surroundings, like a jelly fish with tentacles. It is basically the id. Its one of the oldest, if not the oldest, survival mechanisms.

When organisms evolved consciousness, it became more and more sophisticated over millions of years. When other animals were using their conscious to become, faster, stronger, and everything in between, early human ancestors were using their conscious to become smarter. Humans might not be the fastest, strongest, or most vicious animals, but they learned how to start controlling the environment around them.

So this is how humans developed, what I believe is our superior sense, discovery. You mentioned that if you watched a program in another language, it would be sound without meaning. But thats not true, you would be cognizant that there is meaning, but you just don't understand it. Knowing that there is meaning is the first step, then after that, you have the ability to understand the meaning of that language if you chose to.

Scientist and great thinkers have used this sense of discovery. They knew there was meaning, but scientist rarely have a "eureka" moment of explanation. These scientists and great thinkers have a sense of some kind of meaning, and when they figure out the meaning, is when the discovery becomes becomes another evolutionary advantage to controlling the environment around them.

Just think of the huge advantage, in an evolutionary way, that having fire brought to humans. There is no doubt in my mind that natural selection was preferential to the brains that could discover, the brains that could then understand the discovery, and then the large majority of brains that just trusted both because they simply just understood that their lives were easier with them.

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We also conceptualize based upon what we see, feel, smell, hear and taste.,..evcen when we attempt to describe or address things we take to be "beyond" such mundane concerns.  Take, for example, the invisible red thread of asian myth.  

The thing that connected us all, spiritually, to the all..as it were....was something familiar to weavers...string.   It was invisible, but apparently red.  Our imaginations aren't quite as unbounded as some seem to think.  The possibilities, when you actually consider what it is any given person is conceptualizing, are all mundane and familiar.  This isn;t to say that we haven;t got something™ that other animals don;t have...but it may be quantitative, not qualitative..in difference.

You know how when you're trying to learn something but you can't understand it, but then someone uses an illustration and it suddenly makes sense? I think that basically sums up why different cultures threw in arbitrary details, like red. Humans started using more and more symbols to represent the ideas that were becoming more and more cognizant. But while some could understand without the symbols, the majority needed the symbols to make sense, because they have brains that are conditioned to understand the tangible.

And I would just say to your last point about qualitative vs qualitative. Humans have learned from thousands and thousands of years of discovery, that there is always more to discover. Humans have also learned that discovery, usually, is a benefit. I just don't think the quantitative or qualitative, the advantage is efficiency.

It is a beautiful evolutionary advantage, whereas other animals keep adapting to their strengths, they end up going extinct when the ever changing ecosystem, changes too fast for them to adapt. Humans on the other hand, developed the ability to adapt without having to wait for thousands or millions of years to pass. Of course, that begs the question about their advancements bringing their own demise, but that is a completely new can of worms