In the scientific world, there is still no single theory about the development and evolution of consciousness that would suit everyone and would not raise questions. There is, however, a very clear idea of all the problems and controversies associated with this topic. First of all, we are talking about the nature of a special mental state that distinguishes a person from all other living beings and gives him a subjective understanding of his own existence and his own thinking. Heidegger called this phenomenon dasein, and even earlier Descartes used the expression cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") to describe a similar phenomenon. In what follows, we will refer to this phenomenon as p-consciousness. In this article, we will look at the perspective of its evolutionary explanation.
Evolution of human consciousness
Our consciousness has given us the opportunity to reach a fundamentally new level of development, which is characterized by scientific and technological progress - a rapid process of improving the species, bypassing alllaws of nature and evolutionary rules. That is why many thinkers are interested in the origin of our thinking, self-organization and complex behavioral patterns, and not purely biological evolution. After all, it was not even the brain that made us unique, but what is beyond it - thinking and consciousness.
The idea of cognitive evolution is not an independent theory, but has close links with integral theory, spiral dynamics and the noosphere hypothesis. It is also associated with the theory of the global brain or collective mind. One of the earliest uses of the phrase "evolution of consciousness" may be Mary Parker Follett's 1918 report. Follet said that the evolution of thought leaves less and less room for the herd instinct and more for the group imperative. Humanity is emerging from the "herd" state, and now, in order to discover a rational way of life, it studies the relations in society, instead of directly feeling them and thus adjusting them to ensure unhindered progress at this higher level.
Features
One of the real advances made in recent years has been that we have learned to distinguish between different kinds of thinking. Not everyone agrees on exactly what distinctions need to be made, but everyone at least agrees that we must distinguish a being's mind from its mental state. It is one thing to say of an individual person or organism that he is conscious, even if only partially. It's not that hard. It is quite another thing to define one of the mental states of a being as a state of consciousness. This can only be fully said about a person.
Mental state
Also, no one denies that in the very thinking of beings we must distinguish between intransitive and transitive variants. The understanding that the organism is the localizer of this process is that we can safely say that it is awake, as opposed to a sleeping or comatose organism. We feel it very well.
Scientists still have questions regarding the evolution of the mechanisms that control wakefulness and regulate sleep, but these seem to be questions only for evolutionary biology. They should not be considered within the framework of psychology and philosophy.
Evolution of consciousness: from the psyche of animals to human consciousness
So we're talking about a mouse that it understands that the cat is waiting for it at the hole, thus explaining why it doesn't come out. This means that she perceives the presence of a cat. Thus, in order to provide an evolutionary explanation for the transitive thinking of creatures, it is necessary to try to explain the emergence of perception. Undoubtedly, there are many problems here, some of which we will return to later.
It is consciousness as the driving principle of evolution that has placed man at the very top of the food chain. Now it seems certain.
Turning now to the concept of the mind as a mental state, the main difference lies in phenomenal thinking, which is a purely subjective feeling. Most theorists believe that there are mental states such as acoustic thoughts orjudgments that are conscious. But there is as yet no agreement on whether mental states can be p-conscious without being so in a functionally defined sense. There have even been disputes about whether the phenomenon of the mind can be explained in functional and/or representative terms.
Access concept
Consciousness as the driving principle of evolution is a very powerful tool for interacting with the outside world. It seems clear that there is nothing deeply problematic about functionally defined notions of thinking as a mental state when viewed from a naturalistic point of view.
However, all who deal with this issue agree that it is philosophically the most problematic. The philosophy of the evolution of consciousness is not only Kant and the phenomenology of mind, but also Heidegger with his concept of dasein, and Husserl's phenomenology. This question has always been de alt with in the humanities, but in our time they have given way to the natural sciences. The psychology of the evolution of consciousness is still an unknown area.
It is not easy to understand how properties characteristic of the mind - phenomenal sensation or something like that - can be realized in the neural processes of the brain. Similarly, it is difficult to understand how these properties could develop. Indeed, when people talk about the "problem of consciousness", they mean the problem of thinking.
Mysticism and physiology
There are those who believe that the connection between the mind and the rest of the natural world is inherentlymysterious. Of these, some believe that mental states are not determined by physical (and physiological) processes, although they may be closely related to the physical world through natural laws. Others believe that although we have general reason to believe that mental states are physical, their material nature is inherently hidden from us.
If p-consciousness is a mystery, then so is its evolution, and this idea is generally correct. If there is an evolutionary history, then under this topic the study will be nothing more than an account of the evolution of certain physical structures in the brain with which we can think that thinking is inextricably linked, or structures that give rise to it as an epiphenomenon. Or, at worst, structures that are causally correlated with mental processes.
Criticism of mystical theories
However, there are no good arguments against mystical approaches to the issue addressed in the article. However, it can be shown that the various arguments that have been presented in support of the mysteriousness of thought are bad because they are unprovable and speculative.
Since the focus of this article is on cases where evolutionary considerations can help resolve alternative explanations for the nature of p-consciousness, mystical approaches should be left aside. Similarly, and for the same reason, we leave aside theories that claim to explain the nature of thought by postulating a typological identity.between mental states and brain states. This is because such identities, even if true, do not really explain some of the mysterious features of p-consciousness, such as prophetic dreams, lucid dreams, mystical experiences, out-of-body experiences, etc.
The right place to look for this explanation is in the cognitive realm - the realm of thoughts and representations. Accordingly, it is on such theories that you should focus your attention.
First order representations
A number of theorists have attempted to explain thinking in terms of first-order representational conditions. The purpose of such theories is to characterize all phenomenal "feelings", properties of experience, in terms of the representative content of experience. Thus, the difference between the perception of green and the perception of red will be explained by the difference in the reflective properties of the surfaces. And the difference between pain and tickling is likewise explained in representative terms. It depends on different methods of influencing different parts of the human body. In each case, subjective experience influences the subject's beliefs and processes of practical thinking, thus determining his behavior. This was confirmed during the evolution of human consciousness in the process of the great transition. Our behavior is largely determined by what and how we see, i.e., the representational capabilities of our brain.
Representational Theory
It seems clear that for such hypotheses it would not be much of a problem to provide an evolutionary explanation for thinking. The purpose of this theoryis to explain in evolutionary terms how transitions occur from organisms with a set of behavioral reflexes triggered by simple environmental features:
- to organisms whose innate reflexes are action patterns driven by incoming quasi-perceptual information;
- to organisms that can have a set of learnable patterns of action, also guided by quasi-perceptual information;
- to an organism in which perceptual information becomes available for simple conceptual thoughts and reasoning.
Environmental triggers
As an example of an organism that relies only on environmental triggers, consider a parasitic worm. The parasite drops out of a perch when it detects a vapor of butyric acid, which is secreted by the glands of all mammals. These are fixed action patterns triggered by some initiating stimuli. But the worm does not comprehend anything and does not consciously correlate its behavior with the surrounding conditions. As an example of an organism with a set of innate patterns of action guided by quasi-perceptual information, solitary wasps are usually cited. Their behavior when leaving a paralyzed cricket in a hole with their eggs seems to be a fixed action. It is, in fact, an action pattern, the details of which depend on a quasi-perceptual sensitivity to the contours of the environment. These states are only quasi-perceptual, since, according to the hypothesis, the wasp lacks the ability for conceptual thinking. Rather, her perception directly controlsbehavior.
For examples of organisms with scientific patterns of action, one can look to fish, reptiles, and amphibians. They are capable of learning new ways of behaving, but they are not capable of anything that really resembles practical reasoning.
Finally, as an example of an organism with conceptual thinking, consider a cat or a mouse. Each of them likely has simple perceptual conceptual representations of the environment and is capable of simple forms of reasoning in light of these representations.
From reflexes to perception
It should be obvious that evolutionary gains at each stage come from increasingly flexible behavior. By moving from evoked reflexes to perceptually oriented states, you get behavior that can be fine-tuned to the contingent features of the organism's current environment. And as you move from a set of perceptually oriented action patterns to conceptual thinking and reasoning, you gain the ability to subordinate some goals to others, and better track and evaluate objects in the world around you.
Advantages of this theory
There is no good argument to be found against first-order representational theory. On the contrary, this theory can provide a simple and elegant account of the development of p-consciousness, which is one of its strengths. According to her, the evolution of consciousness is really just a further development of perception. However, there are serious objections tosuch an approach by supporters of other concepts. Partly it has to do with her inability to make important distinctions and explain some of the mysterious features of our minds.
Higher order representations
First, there is "inner meaning" or experience of a higher order. In accordance with it, our thinking arises when our first-order perceptual states are scanned by the ability to develop internal meanings due to the subjective evolution of consciousness. Secondly, there are higher-order accounts. According to them, consciousness arises when a first-order perceptual state is or can be targeted at the appropriate point. These theories admit two additional subsets:
- relevant, where the actual presence of thinking is assumed, which has a perceptual effect on p-consciousness;
- dispositional, where the presence of a perceptual state is affirmed, which makes it conscious;
- then, finally, there are higher order descriptions. They are similar to previous theories, except that the linguistically formulated descriptions of the subject's mental states function as thoughts.
Approximately this is how the evolution of forms of thinking within the framework of this theory looks like. Each kind of higher-order representational account can claim to explain the phenomena of the mind without requiring recourse to intrinsic, non-representational properties of experience. Scholars have de alt with this claim to higher-order dispositional theory in detail, and so there is no point in repeating it.here.
People have not only a herd instinct, but also a conscious ability to organize into groups united by common rational interests. This prompted the evolution of public consciousness. This is because any system that implements this thought pattern will be able to distinguish or classify perceptual states according to their content.
As cognitive psychology tells us, the evolution of consciousness has gone through many stages before turning into a complex, polished system. Our mind, being a complex system, is able to recognize colors, such as red, because it has a simple mechanism for perceiving red as such, and not in any other way. Bees, for example, perceive yellow as blue. Thus, this system has available to it the concepts of perception of experience. In such a case, missing and inverted subjective experiences immediately become a conceptual possibility for those who apply these concepts as the basis of their mind. If such a system is ever created, then we can sometimes think about our inner experience in the following way: "There could be some other reason for this type of experience." Or will we be able to ask, "How do I know that red things that appear red to me don't appear green to another person?" And so on.
Modern vision of evolution
Hominids may well have developed in specialized groups -cooperative systems of exchange created for work and tool production, collection and organization of information about the living world, selection of partners and the direction of sexual strategies, and so on. This is what some evolutionary psychologists and archaeologists suggest. These systems would operate independently of each other, and at this stage most of them would not have access to each other's outputs. Although the anthropologist Dennett does not give us an exact date for the supposed development of these processes, this first stage may well coincide with a period of massive brain growth lasting two or more million years between the first appearance of Homo habilis and the evolution of archaic forms of Homo sapiens. By that time, the evolution of consciousness from the psyche of animals to the consciousness of man had already been completed.
Secondly, hominids then developed the ability to create and perceive natural language, which was used at first exclusively for interpersonal communication. This stage may well have coincided with the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens in South Africa about 100,000 years ago. This ability for complex communication immediately provided our ancestors with a decisive advantage, allowing for more subtle and adaptable forms of cooperation, as well as a more efficient accumulation and transmission of new skills and discoveries. Indeed, we see that the species Homo sapiens sapiens quickly colonized the globe, crowding out competing hominin species.
In Australia, people first arrived about 60,000 years ago. On this continent our species was more efficient at hunting than its predecessors, and soon began carving harpoons from bone,fishing, etc. This is the fruit of the evolution of human consciousness.
As Dennett says, we have begun to discover that by asking ourselves questions, we can often gain information that we did not previously know. Each of the specialized processing systems had access to language patterns. By creating questions and getting answers from their own minds, these systems would be free to interact and access each other's resources. As a result, Dennett thinks, this constant stream of “inner speech” that takes up so much of our time, which is a kind of virtual processor (serial and digital) superimposed on parallel distributed human processes, has completely transformed our brain. Now this phenomenon is usually called "internal dialogue", and almost all spiritual and practical teachings have developed their own psychotechnics to stop it. However, that's another story.
Let's get back to the emergence of internal dialogue and other attributes of complex consciousness. The final stage of its emergence may well have coincided with a surge of culture around the world around 40,000 years ago, including the use of beads and necklaces as jewelry, the burial of the dead with ceremonies, bone and horn work, the creation of complex weapons, and the production of carved figurines. Later, the evolution of forms of historical consciousness began, but this is also another story.
Language connection
According to the contrasting opinion, it is possible that before the evolution of language there was only a rather limited ability to communicate in the form of mutu altransmission of primitive signals. However, even if this were the case, it remains an open question whether this primitive language was involved in the internal operations of mature mental interaction. Even if it developed gradually, it is quite possible that structured forms of thought could become accessible to modern man even without the development of language.
The evolution of the psyche and the development of consciousness went parallel to each other. Since there is evidence regarding this issue, there is an opinion that structured forms of thinking can appear without a developed language. One has only to look at deaf people who grow up isolated in a society of their own kind (also deaf) and who do not learn any form of syntactically structured characters (letters) until a very late age. These people, however, develop systems of their own language and often engage in complex pantomimes to communicate something to those around them. This is similar to the classic cases of Grichan's communication - and they seem to suggest that the ability to think does not depend on the presence of a complex language.
Conclusion
The evolution of human consciousness hides many secrets. Evolutionary considerations cannot help us if our goal is to argue with mystical views of the nature of the human mind or first-order representational theories. But they give us good reasons to prefer a dispositionist view of the evolution of forms of consciousness, on the one hand, or a theory of a higher order, on the other. They must alsoplay a part in demonstrating the superiority of dispositional theory over higher order theory.
