A conjecture on the nature and evolution of consciousness

Abstract

The profound importance of consciousness in everyday life suggests that it is a natural and necessary outgrowth of our biological heritage. In this paper we offer a conjecture that consciousness is a deep property of biological life itself. We propose a specific model of how a form of core consciousness could be present in all life forms, and subsequently how each species could create a unique form of consciousness from that common core. We formulate the first consideration as the core consciousness conjecture, and the extension to all animals as the extended core consciousness conjecture.

Keywords:

• consciousness
• evolution

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Neuropsychoanalysis Working Group for the discussion and improvements its members contributed, and the reviewers for suggestions that extended and improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Terence W. Rogers http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0611-3551

Notes

1. In Sacks et al (2015) several respected authors reaffirmed their view that certain properties of an individual cell could be considered as the starting point for aspects of consciousness. In his reply, Koch respectfully disagreed. While acknowledging the significance of these basic properties of the cell, and the work of Hille, he observed that a property of a component of a system can be vital to the overall functioning of the system without playing any direct role in emergent properties of the system. This paper agrees with the Koch view that we should look to the cooperative properties of the system rather than to specific cell properties for the clue to consciousness.

2. We are using 500 msecs as a proxy for the time evolution of a complex process that is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 “The signatures of consciousness” in Dehaene (2014). However, note that recent work on Event Related Potentials (ERP’s) associated with visual awareness suggests that Dehaene’s P3 signature is too simple an explanation. For a detailed discussion see Railo, Koivisto, and Revonsuo (2011). Our conjecture does not depend on the specific mechanics of how sensory processing starts with unconscious processing and can become conscious. There is a general agreement (see Railo et al., 2011) that there are one or more mechanisms that create a “binding” between the different parts of the brain processing the sensory signal, and these and their associated ERP’s constitute neural correlates of conscious awareness.

3. We are emphasizing the role of stimuli in categorizing components of the conscious state, but it is important to recognize that processes are also involved, and a richer system model would have subsystems that managed the stimuli being the contributors to the conscious state. Also we would explicitly recognize that it is a two-way process, neither just bottom-up nor top-down.