An evolutionary history shows how consciousness is key to human survival
What does it mean to say that I am conscious? For sure, consciousness is a protean term, with multiple meanings. Among its features are some or all of the following: trivially, that I am awake and not asleep or “unconscious”; more positively that I am aware of my surroundings, experiencing and responding to the sensory web of vision, sound, scent that bombards my every moment, that I can relate present sensations to past experience, remember the past, anticipate and plan for the future, that I can decide upon a course of action, or the form and words of the sentence I am writing. All these sensations, memories, plans and anticipations of action occur within the private, subjective world encompassed by the at once familiar and mysterious words “I” and “me”. “I” is a self, with a mind, an internal subjectivity and a permeable boundary to the external social and physical world. Humans are social animals, and our consciousness is profoundly part of, shaped by and necessary for, our existence as social beings.
Once upon a time, worrying about the mind and consciousness was the job of philosophers and theologians. Tranquil introspection was the method, as when in the fifth century St Augustine asked how it was that the mind could encompass vast regions of space and time, imaginary as well as real objects, or the idea of God. Eleven hundred years later, by which time, at least in western philosophy, minds and consciousness had become indissolubly linked to the brain, Descartes famously believed he had solved the problem by separating mind/soul from body as two separate worlds, interacting through a portal in the brain’s pineal gland. Souls were given by God and unique to humans; the remainder of the living world was mere mechanism. Such a dualistic solution could not survive the onward materialist march of the physical and biological sciences, which seek to unify the world within an overarching framework in which everything is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties of the fundamental particles and forces that constitute the universe.
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