The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

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• Hacker News
• Consciousness occurs when:

  (1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes.

  (2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes.

  (3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module.

  This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of).

  That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness.

  This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly.

  So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness.

  It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy.

  But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it".

  Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario.

  Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions.

  Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness.

  One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest.

  So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.

  by Nevermark
• How far down the tree of life does this theory consider to be conscious?
  by akkartik
• This book is apparently the main source of inspiration for Blindsight by Peter Watts
  by ivan4th
• I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).
  by N_Lens
• As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong.

  Rather, how much of it is just language.

  We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.

  I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.

  It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.

  by TheHardProblem
• That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

  You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

  by mjd
• I think that given the developments in AI in the last ~10 years, it would be hard to say that attention is not part of consciousness. I'm not sure if it is "all you need", but I think that any theory that doesn't include it would be very doubtful.
  by abecode
• I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?
  by colinrand
• How would you define it?

  Would your definition be that of your experience?

  Would that definition encompass all of humanity, past and present?

  Would that definition contain all sapient life? Sentient too?

  Would that definition allow for less complex forms of life?

  Reading the comments on this post, I am inclined to agree with the words of his biographer “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.”

  If you do get a chance to actually read the book (as you ought to), it covers all the issues and complexities you may have. It is limited only by the information of the era.

  by JK-Swizzle
• Apparently you don't need much brain to be conscious. This boy was born with 2% of a brain.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k

  I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!

  by smalltorch
• The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats.

  Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.

  by tim333
• I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.
  by pavel_lishin
• It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.

  I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

  by mjd
• Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.

  The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.

  by GlenTheMachine
• > If consciousness spread virally

  “The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0]

  0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel

  Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.

  by adolph
• Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.
  by detourdog
• "Somehow"

  We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.

  by geophile
• There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon.

  Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.

  by whtrbt
• Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...

  To your point:

  > Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.

  SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...

  by carbonguy
• The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.
  by agaj-nimm
• The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues.

  And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.

  by bonoboTP
• Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.
  by Telemakhos
• Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.
  by nemo
• The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.
  by txrx0000
• The more interesting aspect of that is that there's an element of recall implicit in that though: if someone was active, moving around and interacting according to observers then whether they were conscious during that time is heavily informed by whether they remember it later.

  Quite where that line exists then is very fuzzy because while for example I feel conscious while I'm typing this, it's also clearly possible I could but then have no memory of it.

  by XorNot
• Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO.

  Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.

  by lostmsu
• > when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.

  How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?

  by adolph
• I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.
  by JK-Swizzle
• Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.
  by sillywabbit