Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

A Practical Origin Others see consciousness as useful to find solutions to practical problems. The Australian philosopher David Malet Armstrong, for example, argued that the biological function of consciousness is to “sophisticate” the mental processes so that they yield more interesting action. The Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith speculated that the "Cambrian explosion" of species that took place about 500 million years ago created awareness in each animal of other animals, and therefore the "mind" evolved in response to other "minds". The Cambrian caused an information revolution because organisms had a lot more to process now that they were aware of other organisms. This originated consciousness and more than once: one evolutionary branch led to apes and humans, and another one led to octopuses, which have very different brains. Similarly, the US neurologist Todd Feinberg and the US biologist Jon Mallatt argued that consciousness arose during the Cambrian explosion and that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious. The Israeli neuroscientist Simona Ginsburg and evolutionary biologist Eva Jablonka, inspired by Aristoteles recognize three kinds of teleological (goal-directed) systems, three "modes of being", each characterized by a different telos/goal: life, sentience and rationality. They think that the evolution of consciousness was driven by the evolution of learning. In particular, a boost to the evolution of learning came from the "Cambrian explosion" of about 500 million years ago, when a multitude of species were created in a relatively short span of time. Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest that the transition from nonconscious life to minimal consciousness requires "unlimited associative learning" (UAL), a major step forward from limited associative learning (LAL) that can only respond to simple stimuli. UAL enables an organism to assign value to experiences and use it to plan future actions as well as to predict events. Ginsburg and Jablonka believe that UAL both originated during the Cambrian explosion and was one of the major driving forces causing that explosion of species. UAL exponentially increased an animal's adaptive novelty, i.e. enabled animals to develop novel behaviors that allowed them to exploit new environmental resources, to colonize new environmental niches, to become both more effective predators and more evasive prey. Unlike consciousness, which is subjective ad impossible to "measure", UAL is a tractable quantity which can be observed and measured, and related to specific brain structures and processes. Before and after UAL there were different modes of being. And then there has been another transition in mode of being when humans evolved rationality. So they identify three modes of being: life, consciousness and rationality. This evokes Daniel Dennett’s four kinds of "creatures": Darwinian, Skinnerian, Popperian and Gregorian creatures. They found no evidence of UAL in most animals. They found it only in most vertebrates, some arthropods (notably honey bees and fruit fies) and some cephalopod mollusks, notably the octopus. The brains of these species are anatomically different, but at the end of the day they are all capable of integrating multisensorial stimuli, of generating models of the body and of the world, of "judging" the value of situations, and of planning and predicting actions. This would mean that many more animals have consciousness than just humans. Ginsburg and Jablonka also propose that symbolic language played a similar function for the evolutionary transition from consciousness to rationality. So they identify three transitions in goal-driven mode of being: the transition from non-life to life (the “nutritive soul”), the transition from non-conscious to conscious (the “sensitive soul”) and the transition from non-rational to rational (the “rational soul”). Alas, today consciousness hardly contributes to survival. We often get depressed because we are conscious of what happens to us. We get depressed just thinking of future things, such as death. Consciousness often results in less determination and perseverance. Consciousness cannot be the ultimate product of Darwinian evolution towards more and more sophisticated survival systems, because it actually weakens our survival system. Consciousness' apparent uselessness for survival may be more easily explained if we tipped our reference frame. It is generally assumed that humans' ancestors had no consciousness and consciousness slowly developed over evolutionary time.  Maybe it goes the other way around: consciousness has always existed, and during evolution most species have lost part of it.  Being too self-aware does hurt our chances of surviving and reproducing. Maybe evolution is indirectly improving species by reducing their self-awareness. Back to the beginning of the chapter "A History of Consciousness" | Back to the index of all chapters