Seite 2: Consciousness

But what is consciousness? The prescientific suggestion, that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world, has had notable social consequences, but failed as a scientific hypothesis. Physical science has only recently begun to address the question on its own terms, from vantage points including evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, neurobiology and many computer techniques.

The human kind of consciousness may be a byproduct of a brain evolved for social living. Memory, prediction and communication mechanisms, similar but distinct from those for keeping track of physical objects, evolved to classify and communicate the moods and relations of tribe members. Aggressive and submissive behaviors, for instance, just like bad and good smells, became classified into categories linked not only to behavioral responses, but to communicable symbols. As language evolved, it became possible to tell stories about both physical and psychological events. At some point, perhaps very early in the evolution, the story telling mechanism was turned back on the teller, and the story began to include commentary about the teller's state of mind along with that of others.

Our consciousness may be primarily the continuous story we tell ourselves, from moment to moment, about what we did and why we did it. It is a thin, often inaccurate, veneer rationalizing a massive quantity of unconscious processing. Not only is our consciousness-story a weak reflection of physical and brain reality, but its very existence is a purely subjective attribution. Viewed from the physical outside, the story is just a pattern of electrochemical events, probably in our cortex. A complex psychological interpretation must be invoked to translate those events into a meaningful story. From the psychological inside, the story is compelling, because the psychological interpretation is an essential element of the story, its relationships enforced (unconsciously) by the interconnections of the story-telling neural machinery.

On the one hand, our consciousness may be an evolutionary fluke, telling an unreliable story in a far-fetched interpretation of a pattern of tiny salty squirts. On the other, our consciousness is the only reason for thinking we exist (or for thinking we think). Without it there are no beliefs, no sensations, no experience of being, no universe.