#1575 Why did we evolve consciousness?

Why did we evolve consciousness? We evolved consciousness because it gave us a greater chance of survival.

Evolution is a chance machine, and it generally works in three ways. Every time creatures reproduce, there is a chance that a mutation will appear in the genes of their offspring. This change could help them in some way. For example, moths in London during the Industrial Revolution that changed from white to black. The mutation helped the moths blend in, they weren’t eaten by predators, and they had the chance to pass on their genes, which meant the new genes spread. The change could neither help nor hinder the creature. The majority of mutations would probably fall into this category. And the last type of mutation harms the offspring in a way that means they can’t pass on their genes, and it usually disappears. The fact that consciousness in some form is so widespread suggests that it brought enough advantages that the genes supporting it continued over time.

We can talk about the evolutionary advantages of general consciousness, but those are possibly different from the level of consciousness that we have as humans. If consciousness is the ability to act on sensory information with the whole of the brain, integrating different sections, then it makes a brain vastly different from that of, say, a jellyfish. Many animals have relatively simple nervous systems that rely more on hard-wired responses and simple learning. Everything works on reactions to certain stimuli. When you get to the brain of an animal like a mammal, they are able to take the stimuli and combine them to make a more complete image of their surroundings. They can use their consciousness to act in ways that a jellyfish could not. There are clear advantages to this. They can react to new situations, depending on their level of consciousness, of course, and they can adjust. They can also adapt their behavior when their senses tell them it is necessary. Experiments where animals learn to avoid a certain color after a shock suggest a level of learning and flexibility that goes beyond simple reflex.

Of course, one problem with consciousness in both animals and in humans is that it requires a bigger brain, and a bigger brain requires more food. The brain is one of the body’s most energy-hungry organs, and in humans, it uses a surprisingly large share of our resting energy. To have a bigger brain, we need to find more food to sustain it.

Human consciousness is far more advanced. We obviously have the same advantages that animals do, such as in adaptability and the ability to adapt our behavior, but our consciousness brings us several more. I can see at least five that we can look at. The first must be planning. Humans seem to be unusually good at planning: running detailed ‘what if’ simulations before acting. This allows us to conserve energy and helps us make fewer mistakes. It isn’t always an advantage, though, and can backfire, because it lets us rehearse threats that are not happening or real and it is one of the reasons why so many of us are anxious all the time.

Another thing is that consciousness allows us to prioritize where we pay attention. When we were hunter gatherers, we needed to focus on the signs our food left, but as we moved into larger groups and became more social, we had a vastly larger amount of information to keep track of. Knowing what to prioritize and when is a significant advantage.

Third, we can keep track of ourselves. We are aware of our bodies, and we can keep our goals and motives in our brains. We can tell what condition we are in physically and mentally, and we can adjust our behavior to allow us to conserve energy or go harder. We understand how far we can push ourselves and what we are able to do. This allows us to ultimately go further and do more.

The fourth and fifth things are very connected. Humans can survive much more effectively in groups than we can as individuals, and consciousness allows us to communicate and it allows us to predict and understand other people’s intentions and feelings. We need consciousness to be able to understand what we want to say, but we also need it to take in what someone else has said and effectively analyze it. Hearing speech is different from just hearing sound because it requires a different set of reactions. And consciousness lets us understand what other people in a group want and how they are feeling. This gives us the ability to be an effective member of the group, and we all thrive together.

Consciousness didn’t evolve in one jump, and it is not done evolving yet. The great thing about evolution is that there is no end, no goal. Who knows what will happen to consciousness in the future. Evolution clearly favors functions like planning and social intelligence, but whether our subjective consciousness is an adaptation, a side-effect, or something else is still debated. And this is what I learned today.

Sources

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/07/19/study-sheds-light-on-where-conscious-experience-resides-in-brain