Consciousness

• seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
  This is what we humans do, argues Humphrey, quoting from Descartes’ contem-
  porary Thomas Hobbes, who said:
  Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth when he
  does think, opine, reason, hope, fear &c. and upon what grounds, he shall
  thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other
  men upon the like occasions.
  (Hobbes, 1648/1946, in Humphrey, 1987, p. 381)

So Humphrey proposes that natural selection favoured self-reflexive insight. ‘Now

imagine that a new form of sense organ evolves, an “inner eye”, whose field of

view is not the outside world but the brain itself’ (Humphrey, 1987, p. 379; 2002,

pp. 74–75). In similar vein, Dawkins speculates that ‘Perhaps consciousness arises

when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must

include a model of itself ’ (Dawkins, 1976, p. 59).

The problem with both these ideas is that the picture we have of ourselves (if

picture is even the right word) is not of glial cells, neurons, synapses, or brain

activity, but of a person. Indeed, most people on the planet know nothing of

what their brain would look like if they could see it. So perhaps the self-descrip-

tion needs to be understood in some other way, such as in Graziano’s attention

schema (Chapter  7) or Metzinger’s self-model (Chapter  16), or in computational

terms (Chapter 12), rather than as a model of the brain itself.

Humphrey describes the picture as a user-friendly description, designed to tell us

as much as we need to know in a way we can understand. It allows us to see our

own brain states as conscious states of mind. This, claims Humphrey, is what con-

sciousness amounts to. It is a self-reflexive loop, rather like Hofstadter’s strange ‘I’

loop (Chapter  16), whose function is to give human beings an effective tool for

doing natural psychology.

Other theories build directly on Humphrey’s early

ideas. For example, British archaeologist Steven

Mithen (1996) agrees that consciousness has a

social function and that chimpanzees probably

have conscious awareness of their own minds. But

he argues that if Humphrey is right, this aware-

ness should extend only to thoughts about social

interaction. Yet we humans seem to be conscious

of all sorts of other things. It is this broadening of

awareness that he sees as critical in the creation

of the modern human mind.

Mithen likens our minds to a vast cathedral with

many smaller chapels. In early hominid evolution,

separate abilities evolved largely cut off from

each other, like the modules in the Swiss army knife analogy. In Homo habilis, and

even in the later Neanderthals, social intelligence was isolated from tool-making

or interacting with the natural world: ‘consciousness was firmly trapped within

the thick and heavy chapel walls of social intelligence – it could not be “heard” in

the rest of the cathedral except in a heavily muffled form’ (Mithen, 1996, p. 147).

These creatures, he supposes, had an ephemeral kind of consciousness with no

Sense

organs

‘Inner eye’

Motor

systems

Brain

FIGURE 11.5 • According to Humphrey’s earlier
views, consciousness arose
when a new form of sense
organ evolved, an ‘inner eye’
whose field of view was not the
outside world but the brain itself
(Humphrey, 2002, p. 75; 1986,
p. 70).