Consciousness as a learned skill

I am leaning to idea that consciousness is a learned skill. It is all biology.

My starting point is that consciousness is composed of awareness and internal dialogue.

Obviously, the definition of consciousness is an open question, but for this post, I will consider consciousness to include the awareness of the environment surrounding the organism, including awareness of ‘self’, and that “stream of consciousness” that we all seem to have. Thoughts running through our heads. I call this an “internal dialogue”, and I suggest that it was not possible before the earliest precursors of language.

Awareness comes from the ability to receive external signals (light, sound, taste, touch, odor) and to balance these in such manner that the entity persists through time (life). Before there was awareness of self, or even awareness, there was this balance of the entity with the environment, or the entity would not exist. Using external signals to cause action or reaction is very fundamental to all life forms. You do not have to have name for the external signals, you just have to respond to them. Before dialogue there was response.

Use of the senses, particularly visual, allows the entity to have a representation or picture of the external world. This allows an “awareness” of the external without any awareness of self or of the awareness process.

Once upon a time, say 3 billion years ago, beings (entities, organisms — bacteria and archaea — prokaryotes) just existed in the natural environment. They were balanced with the surroundings, but there was no “awareness” or mental anything.

Over time, eukaryotes appeared, and multi-cellular life forms expanded greatly. Nervous systems evolved and the senses all developed and all helped the organism to survive. This was the evolutionary movement towards brains as centers of nerve activity and control of functions in the entity. As eyes developed, for instance, nerves and brain capabilities grew. Or we might say that nature learned.

Over the last billion years of evolution, our ancestor species developed more powerful brain functions. In mammals (where we came from) eyesight and use of light developed such that we have a “picture” or our surroundings. Species back then used visual images to their advantage. It was an excellent survival tool.

So when evolution got to primates, say about 20 million years ago, they had full body organs and systems for biological survival (and to have offspring). Did these primates have “consciousness”, do dogs today have “consciousness”? A visual representation of surroundings — awareness, yes. But they had/have no mental construct that represents the environment around them (or do they?).

Brains (and organisms) before language reacted to inputs from the senses and responded with appropriate actions. This happens to all of us and we know that sensations can cause muscle movement (touch a hot stove) all without any conscious or thought reaction. But this happens with no awareness of surroundings or any mental construct of what is happening. A signal comes in and the body responds.

Before any kind of mental construct for the world, these pre-language entities had a stimulus-response system that helped keep them alive.

And then came sound modification.

This started the road to consciousness (awareness of self and the surrounding environment). This was an enhancement to use of sound. That is, we learned new skills and those skills led to “consciousness”.

This ‘sound modification’ skill led to the ‘internal dialogue’ component of consciousness. Stream consciousness or stream of thought led to logic and knowledge. This is how it started (imo):

· We came down from the trees and learned to walk on two legs. This freed our other limbs to become arms and hands and this moved towards dexterity and tools.

· We controlled fire and this led to sheltering which led to better nutrition and bigger brains to learn more.

· We started chattering, that is using sounds to communicate and exchange information. This led to language and collaboration and the rest is history (well, anthropology and archaeology and history).

It was this development of sound as communication that led to knowledge. This included the ability to reproduce and interpret a much wider range of sounds. It included the ability to convert repeated sounds into meaning.

This is the key: Sound Modulation is the most energy efficient way to transmit information. (Sounds to Civilization).

This ability to use different sounds to carry different meanings led to objectification — the process of attaching sound to an organism, item, idea, etc. Labels (sounds) were future nouns and used to identify “objects”. Ideas became physical in that certain sounds became used throughout the group, that is, these “ideas” (e.g. “grrnk” = bear) became lodged in multiple brains within the group.

Sounds were used to describe actions (eat, sleep) and sounds were put together to make sentences (well, precursors to sentences). “Me eat”. Hominids were learning to store ideas, make more complex sound structures, learning to pass information, learning to name objects.

One of those objects was ‘Self’. At some point, some entity went from no awareness of self to awareness of self. At some point an individual recognized and made ‘self’ an object, a noun, a recognized sound that represented the ‘self’. Self-awareness was born and it was idea that was passed around.

This process of objectification led to the internal dialogue we all have.

This process of going from initial sounds to knowledge is long and involved, and not the subject here. But is important to note that once the process of objectification is learned, it becomes possible to go from name/sounds for physical beings (tree, bear, eat) to name/sounds for non-physical things (love, time, god, motivation, anxiety, math). This is how knowledge came about.

So far, I am contending that brains have subconscious awareness of the world about them, that is, a representation, which is really a stimulus response system reacting to the senses. And that hominids developed sound modulation that lead to sounds having meaning. And that sounds, having meaning, led to language and knowledge.

If this internal dialogue is the key to consciousness, then we need to understand how this came about and we need to recognize that is not mysterious and just a biological condition.

Before actually considering these steps that led to language and consciousness, let me review what we know about the brains and its functioning.

These are the givens for our understanding of brains and thought:

· Networks composed of neurons with connections (synapses, axial, dendrites) to multiple other neurons.

· Upwards to 86 billion neurons and trillions of possible connections or pathways

· Activation of pathways or neurons through chemical reactions

· Development of new neurons and pathways and hence ‘learning’

· Storage of some information as part of the pathway configuration and use

· Huge Combinations of Neurons and pathways to store (somehow) meaning and procedures for patterns and pattern recognition.

· The Predominance of certain pathways over other pathways.

· The ability of brain activations to lead to muscle movement

The key factor is that the brain responds to stimuli and these responses include thought patterns and a stream of consciousness.

Now let’s go back to sound modulation and learning. The time period we are talking about is around two million years ago (Homo erectus) and hominids starting to shelter together. This could have been after the controlling of fire (800,000? ya). The estimates for the earliest signs of language are between 200,000 years ago and 1.5 million ya.

Hominids, over multiple millennia, improved or learned sound reproduction and reception. And they had to make this key step: the conversion of sound to meaning within the brain. Let’s be clear here: mammals and primates before humans all used sounds that carried meaning. Warning cries, cuing sounds, joy, etc. What hominids did was vastly expand the diversity and use of sound to develop whole language and sounds to represent non-physical items (e.g square root of -2),

Within the brain, these characteristics matter for this discussion.

· The brain has electrical like activity throughout its trillion pathways, with stimulation and activity in multiple parts of the brain concurrently.

· At any instance of time the brain, with its stimulated neurons, represents a “state” of that activity.

· The time scale of these “state” changes is thousands to million times smaller than our capacity to do imaging, so our current knowledge of what is happening is actually quite limited.

· Because of the trillions of possible “states” it will never be possible to know truly know what is going on at neuron/synapse level (writ large).

· Learning is either the development of new neural connections (growth) or the use of existent pathways which makes them more prominent, and, therefore, used more in the thought processes.

· The primary thought/consciousness activities are through pattern recognition and matching through memory searches and learned thought process.

· It cannot be stressed enough: brain activity can move bodily muscles and this is especially true with language and speech. (Say the alphabet and study how your mouth/tongue/lips muscles move).

All of these brain activities are “learned”, they are a skill that enhanced our species’ survival.

Once our species learned to do sound better, it learned to store and understand knowledge better, it developed a picture of the world around that included awareness.

But let’s go deeper and talk about stream of consciousness: this is simply a brain activity. If nothing else is going on in the outside world, our brains can go into a default mode, and I contend this default mode contains a continual internal speech activity that is our “stream of consciousness”. It is a process we have learned because of use of sound and ideas and sentences,

Here is the mystery of consciousness: What are the neural brain states that lead to speech and dialogue and the express of ideas and thought? This, indeed, is a hard problem because the complexity of the neural networks and volume of data points. What are the patterns or states that lead to activation of thought? This we do not know (yet).

But it is not hard because of some greater connection to the universe. Consciousness (it seems to me) is a learned skill that come about because of enhanced use of sound.

Speech, thinking, internal dialogue, stream of consciousness: these are all improvements that led to our knowledge and intelligence and our dominance as a species.

p.s With our intelligence, are we smart enough to solve the problems climate change, resource depletion and better distribution of benefits of our economic system?

p.s Final note on references: I have not quoted authors that influence my thought, but these are three of the most influential: Dawkins, Dennett, and E. O. Wilson. Also, I have read most recently in Medium: Benjamin Cain, Matthew, Gerald A. Baron, Deepak Chopra, Ethan Siegel and many others who write about religion, science, consciousness, philosophy, etc.