Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon

ACtIVItY 11.1

The sentience line

Is a stone conscious? Is a rose bush? Is a tadpole or a
sheep? Is a baby? Are you? Where do you draw the line?

Gather together a collection of objects that you think
span the range from definitely unconscious to definitely
conscious. If you are doing this at home, you may
have a pet to represent the animals, and house plants
or a bunch of flowers for the plant kingdom. Indeed,
you may be able to see enough examples just sitting
in your own kitchen. Lay them out in front of you from
the least to the most conscious and take a good look.

Doing this in class you may need to be more inventive,
but having actual objects there forces people into
making decisions and brings their arguments to life.
You might ask people to bring in:

1 A stone or pebble
2 A weed from the garden, a houseplant, or a piece of fruit
3 A fly, spider, or woodlouse (put them back where
you found them)
4 Tadpoles or pet fish
5 A thermometer
6 A phone
7 A human volunteer

Ask everyone to draw their own sentience line. Select
the two people with the most extreme lines and ask
them to defend their decisions against questions from

the class. Does anyone move their line afterwards?

Deeply troubled he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit:

‘Ah me! If I go now inside the wall and the gateway,

Poulydamas will be first to put a reproach upon me,

[. . .]

Now, since by  my own  recklessness  I have ruined

my people,

I feel  shame  before  the Trojans and the Trojan

women with trailing

robes, that someone who is less of a man than I will

say of me:

Hektor believed in  his own  strength  and ruined

his people.’ [. . .]’

(Homer, The Iliad, XXIII, ll. 13–15, 8th–7th century BC,

translated by R. Lattimore, 1951)

What he means is that there are no words for consciousness, nor

for mental acts. Words that later come to mean ‘mind’ or ‘soul’

mean much more concrete things like blood or breath. And

there is no word for will and no concept of free will. When the

warriors act, they do so not from conscious reasons, motives, or

plans but because the gods speak to them. In fact, the gods take

the place of consciousness. This is why Jaynes describes these

people’s minds as ‘bicameral’ (meaning two-chambered). They

were split. Actions were organised without consciousness, their

motivations being heard as voices. We would now call these

voices hallucinations, but they called them gods. So, ‘Iliadic

man did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness

of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to intro-

spect upon’ (p. 75). On Jaynes’s view, our modern conception of

consciousness as subjectivity describes something that is itself

a recent invention. This view is similar to higher-order theories

in defining consciousness in terms of ‘awareness of awareness’,

and it also fits with an illusionist approach, since Jaynes thinks

of consciousness as a ‘learned cultural ability’ (p. 380) and a

‘metaphor-generated model of the world’ (p. 66). When we

locate consciousness inside our heads and even close our eyes

to try to introspect on it better, we are subject to an illusion: ‘In

reality, consciousness has no location whatever except as we

imagine it has’ (p. 46). He offers one way of tracing the history

of this illusion.

So, there is no consensus over when consciousness evolved,

with theories placing its arrival anywhere between billions of

years ago and only a few thousand years ago.

There is no consensus either over how or why consciousness

evolved, but we are now ready to consider a selection from the many theories

that try to answer these questions. In what follows we will be able to identify

‘There is in general no

consciousness in the Iliad’

(Jaynes, 1976, p. 69)

‘Reflexes and simple

motor programs; no need

for consciousness there!’

(Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016,

p. 62)

‘This consciousness that

is myself of selves, that

is everything, and yet

nothing at all – what

is it? And where did it

come from? And why?’

(Jaynes, 1976, p. 1)

FIGURE 11.3 • The sentience line. Which of these do you think is
conscious? Where do you draw the line?