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when did we develop conciousness?

andyandy

anthropomorphic ape
andyandy
Joined
Apr 30, 2006
Messages
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I've posted a simila thread on the religious/phil boards - but i'd like to look at it from a anthropological perspective....

we are pretty sure that say a fish has no conciousness as such - it is not aware that it is a fish....and that we as humans are aware - we are conscious......so....when did consciousness evolve? were homo-sapiens conscious of self? homo habilis? Chimps?

i remember watching a program where scientists showed that chimps could recognise themselves in the mirror - whilst monkeys couldnt. Does this mean that chimps are regarded as having a consciousness?

is there an evolutionary reason for consciousness to evolve?
 
Hopefully we won't get into endless semantics... I suppose you could make a point that nearly any higher organism is "conscious" in that it is aware of it's surroundings, reacts to them, reacts to stimuli, and so forth.

The next step up might be "self-aware", or capable of recognizing oneself as a distinct individual (as in our chimp) and then on up to being capable of abstract thought.
It's increasingly evident that numbers of higher animals may have these qualities, at least to some degree, and that might be the problem with deciding "when".
Surely our perhaps-inarticulate ancestors, Habilus, Erectus, and so forth had a degree of consciousness; they were capable of creating tools and artifacts, and Neanderthal was apparently capable of ritual.

So when? Maybe better would be when did that final leap to the sort of mental activity evidenced by modern humans occur. Some say that this was not immediately upon the appearance of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but somewhere down the line a bit from that evolutionary jump.
Other anthropologists would say the two events were one and the same.
 
I think it's important in the context of this discussion to distinguish between primary consciousness, or simple awareness of the environment, and secondary (aka reflective) consciousness, which is the awareness of one's primary consciousness.

As to the question of which animals possess primary consciousness, I think this is an unanswerable question in principle. Since a zombie (an unconscious animal who nevertheless behaves identically to a conscious one) is a logically consistent construction, it seems that it is impossible to prove that a given animal is or is not conscious.

Few animals have reflective consciousness. Only humans are known to have it, though most primates, dolphins, and possibly a bird species or two are suspected of possessing self-awareness. There have been several experiments that have attempted to detect this, including the mirror recognition experiment you mentioned.

This experiment (described about halfway down the page) seems to indicate some level of reflective consciousness in rhesus monkeys and bottlenose dolphins. These two animals were shown to be aware of their own uncertainty about the truth of a proposition. This seems indicative that they are aware of themselves in some sense.

I've also heard the theory that reflective consciousness is a logical extension of our brain's modelling abilities. In this theory, a world model is used to test possible courses of action. Primary consciousness occurs when the brain uses sensory input to construct an internal model of the world. Self-awareness occurs when the brain's model is extended to include a model of the organism's brain itself. In fact, it is claimed that one's conscious experience is in fact "located" in the model, and the world that one perceives is not the real world, but the brain's world-model.

Oops. Sorry for rambling so much, it's just that this stuff fascinates me.
 
andyandy said:
we are pretty sure that say a fish has no conciousness as such - it is not aware that it is a fish
Click to expand...

The fish in my tank certainly seem to run away from anything that is not like themselves, and school together with things that are like themselves. That would seem to indicate some level of knowing that they are fish, and even what type of fish they are.

Questions to ask: Does consciousness have to be either on or off? Could it perhaps be a continuum? What is the measure of consciousness? Can you prove that I am conscious?
 
just checked the "mirror test" passers.....

Humans (older than 18 months), great apes (except for gorillas), and bottlenose dolphins have all been observed to pass the test of recognising themselves in a mirror.

as an add on bonus question....how about computers? Could they "evolve" consciousness (with our help :) )
 
As usual, and already noted, all depends on the definition of consciousness used.

Self-recognition in a mirror can only be part of the story (e.g. some marine mammals, and possibly some bats, are capable of sound-based self-recognition). I remember studies on monkeys where self-awareness of arm and hand only were evidenced, providing fuel to the hypothesis of a phylogenetic continuum (of body self-awareness).
 
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Bikewer said:
The next step up might be "self-aware", or capable of recognizing oneself as a distinct individual (as in our chimp)....
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One could argue that we are STILL not completely self-aware, in that we have trouble integrating the concept of mind or "self" with our body image -- we tend to see it as a separate entity ( a "soul", for instance ).
 
Interesting idea aggle-rithm: this is indeed in line with the finding by anthropologists that a form of dualism is present in all societies/cultures, meaning that we are somehow 'hard-wired' to be be spontaneously dualists.

Social performances are also to take into account in a natural history of consciousness: situating oneself in complex, and often mobile, hierarchies, and acting accordingly is indicative of some sense of identity, and sort of a model of the (social) world. Even in cases of failure to classical tests of self-recognition.
 
The question is not well formulated. We dont even mean the same thing with the word "consciousness". Sure, even when using words as simple as "table" we can have semantic problems, but when dealing with the big "C" we are lost in space.

Secondly, we do not have a working theory regarding why and how something as "consciousness" may arise, so I believe we are in a pre-copernican era regarding this.

Is like asking if above the firmament there is water and then discussing it ;)
 
Bodhi Dharma Zen said:
The question is not well formulated. We dont even mean the same thing with the word "consciousness". Sure, even when using words as simple as "table" we can have semantic problems, but when dealing with the big "C" we are lost in space.
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I'm sorry you didnt like my formulation :D

its a very complex topic - but that doesnt mean we're precluded from talking about it.... :)
 
andyandy said:
I'm sorry you didnt like my formulation :D

its a very complex topic - but that doesnt mean we're precluded from talking about it.... :)
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Oh not at all, besides, how could we learn if we just ignored the term? we need to get in touch with it, see it, taste it, to disect it to try to understand. ;)
 
Seems to me a useful definitition of consciousness would be the capacity for introspection or the possesion of qualia. It's never been clear to me why the ability to recognize oneself would necessarily figure into it, as I think this ability probably evolved within social animals in order to allow socialization to work at all. Would solitary animals need this ability? What does it mean if they don't have it? And to lift an example from Roger Penrose (who probably got it from somewhere else), is a video camera that is pointed at a mirror self aware? After all, it does contain an internal representation of itself...

The way I approach the question with animals is simple. Do they act like I would expect them to act if they had consciousness as I define it above? Quite a few of them do. For me, then, the simplest explanation is that they actually are conscious. It would be VERY surprising to me if behaviors in many animals that are analogous to behaviors in human beings do not have a similar cause, i.e. the possession of consciousness.
 
Buckaroo said:
Seems to me a useful definitition of consciousness would be the capacity for introspection or the possesion of qualia.
Click to expand...
You've lost me here (I don't want to venture into the 'qualia' philosophical quagmire; just say that "possession of qualia" makes no sense to me. As to "capacity for introspection", I wonder what kind of observable behavior could allow to make robust inferences about its presence or absence in zebras, kangaroos, penguins, spiders, anacondas, cats, tunas, gorillas, frogs, vampires, and [add all known non-human animal species]).

Here's a standard, classical, indicative list of objective features of consciousness, as found in many textbooks:

  1. coherent, integrated, and controlled nature of behavior
  2. capacity to detect novelty and to adapt to it
  3. pursuit of a constant objective in variable conditions
  4. use of a language
  5. use of complex forms of representation like declarative memory
  6. metacognition (~ executive processes, model of the mind, etc.)

Might be a not too unpractical starting point...
 
andyandy said:
I've posted a simila thread on the religious/phil boards - but i'd like to look at it from a anthropological perspective....
Click to expand...
"Anthropoligical" restricts the matter to humans. Philosophy is uniquely human, not self-awareness. That's why we know how a mirror works, and keep asking the hard questions.

Our sense of identity is the hardest question of all.
 
Doubt

Cecil mentioned that rhesus monkeys and bottle-nosed dolphins were shown to be aware of their own uncertainty about the truth of a proposition.

Does this indicate that skepticism is a sign of higher intelligence?
 
Alphaba said:
Here's a standard, classical, indicative list of objective features of consciousness, as found in many textbooks:

  1. coherent, integrated, and controlled nature of behavior
  2. capacity to detect novelty and to adapt to it
  3. pursuit of a constant objective in variable conditions
  4. use of a language
  5. use of complex forms of representation like declarative memory
  6. metacognition (~ executive processes, model of the mind, etc.)

Might be a not too unpractical starting point...
Click to expand...

Maybe a good start, but this list seems overly restrictive and anthropocentic, and would indeed eliminate many humans from the rolls of the conscious. Under this definition, for example, an aphasic would fail the test.

I kinda got the impression that what Andyandy was talking about was more in line with the folk conception of consciousness, which is pretty much the capacity for introspection -- being aware of one's inner cognitive and emotional states. A sufficiently advanced computer program will probably one day reproduce everything in the above list, without necessarily having this ability. Would we have to consider it conscious? Ask Alan Turing. Personally, I don't think so.

In the case of animals, of course there's no unambiguous way to determine that their behavior demonstrates this form of consciousness. You can't prove it in a human, either. But I know that *I* have it, and since I came from the same evolutionary wellspring as animals, I think that it's reasonable to assume that when a dog appears to experience states that seem like happiness or fear, that it probably *is* some analog of my experience. Can't prove it, but I don't see any a priori reason why humans should be different in this respect.
 
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Perhaps we should not be asking which animals "pass"a mirror test, but asking whether a mirror test is relevant to any animal but ourselves?

Can any conscious person here think of a test a monkey might give a human to see if he was g'g'zxundf?

( I apologise for my spelling. I lack a monkey keyboard. )
 
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