Consciousness

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)

which mystery they claim to be tackling and judge how well they succeed. We

can bring some order to the chaos by thinking of the four options laid out in

Concept 11.1. We have already explored the implausibility of zombie evolution

and conscious inessentialism (consciousness exists but does not do anything). So

we are left with three of our four options: possibly consciousness has a function

in its own right; possibly, like health or horsepower, it just comes along with the

whole; or possibly it is illusory (something exists, but not what we thought it was).

There are theories of all three types.

CONSCIOUSNESS HAS AN

ADAPTIVE FUNCTION

BIoLoGICAL FUnCtIon

‘Qualia are adaptive’, claim Feinberg and

Mallatt. ‘Consciousness is a real, adaptive

phenomenon that is of evolutionary sur-

vival value to the conscious organism’

(2016, pp. 218, 217). They use the hard

problem and the explanatory gap as

markers for the arrival of sensory con-

sciousness, assuming that both arose

together and searching for ‘the evolu-

tionary origins of the gaps themselves’ (p.

11). So, for them, the gap is a real phe-

nomenon with ancient origins rather

than being a recent problem invented

by confused humans using language

and philosophy. They claim that the

hard problem can be solved with conventional biological principles and do this

by assuming mental causation to be a real force that is visible to natural selection,

although what this mental force does and how it works they do not explain.

‘Consciousness is a supremely functional adaptation’, proclaims Bernard Baars;

and so he has to ask, ‘how would you use consciousness, as such, to survive, even-

tually to pass on your genes?’ (1997b, p. 157). His answer is that in our evolution-

ary past, consciousness would have saved us from danger – as in his example of

escaping the full-sized angry bullock. But, as we saw in Chapter  8, he does not

explain why it is ‘consciousness, as such’ – rather than having a global workspace

architecture – which does the trick.

Max Velmans tries to answer by taking two perspectives. From a third-person per-

spective, he says, ‘The same functions, operating to the same specification, could

be performed by a nonconscious machine’ (2000, p. 276), and so ‘it is not obvious

what the reproductive advantage of experiencing such information might be’ (p.

277). His answer is that from a first-person perspective, life without consciousness

would be like nothing, and ‘there would be no point to survival’ (p. 278). Yet he

does not explain why life is not ‘like nothing’ or why there need be a point to our

survival beyond the evolved instincts that keep us alive.

‘Having established

that consciousness is

adaptive, we can now

get down to “solving” the

problem of subjectivity’

(Feinberg and Mallatt, 2016,

p. 220)

Level 1: General biological features that apply to all living things

Life: embodiment and process

System and self-organization

Hierarchy, emergence, and constraint

Teleonomy and adaptation

Level 2: Reflexes that apply to animals with nervous systems

Rates and connectivity

Level 3: Special neurobiological features that apply to animals with sensory

consciousness.

Complex neural hierarchies; a brain

Nested and non-nested hierarchical functions

Neural hierarchies create isomorphic representations and mental

images and/or affective states

Neural hierarchies create unique-neural interactions

7 Attention

Sensory consciousness may be created by diverse neural architectures

FIGURE 11.4 • The defining features of

consciousness (from Feinberg

and Mallatt, 2016, p. 18).