Why Are We Conscious?

When I walk across campus, even across ridges and mudpuddles of the sort that frustrate robot designers, I unconsciously adjust my gait and balance to remain perfectly and efficiently balanced on a few dozen square inches of foot. Pretty sophisticated! Is there any pattern of behavior that couldn't be governed entirely by non-conscious processes like this, at least in principle? I can talk in my sleep. I can find myself reacting in sophisticated ways without prior conscious decision, and I can find myself making sophisticated judgments without prior conscious reasoning. Presumably, both the judgment and the reaction could be generated non-consciously one after the next, making conscious awareness a a fifth wheel that at most provides only permission to continue. Sometimes, it seems, this is how my wittiest jokes emerge, with consciousness barely more than an audience.

In designing our minds, natural selection presumably selected not for consciousness per se but only for behavioral tendencies, so how is it that we come to be conscious beings? Searle and others have suggested that consciousness is essential to creativity. But my automatic witticisms seem plenty creative. Dennett and Rosenthal and many others have suggested that consciousness has to do with self-knowledge -- that it's the mind's way of keeping track of itself or reflects the mind's taking itself as the object of its own processing. Yet the mind must keep track of itself in non-conscious ways, too -- for example in updating beliefs, in retrieving memories (and knowing whether to bother to try to retrieve a memory), in delegating tasks to different subsystems, and such processes are not always conscious.

These brief observations can't refute the sophisticated views of the philosophers mentioned, but I do wonder whether the evolutionary pressure generating consciousness (if there is such pressure) has really been adequately explained.

Thus, I found interesting Nick Humphrey's different type of explanation last week at the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology meeting in Oxford. Humphrey suggested that consciousness was selected not because it gives us any particular type of skill or reflects any special type of knowledge about ourselves or the world. Rather, he suggests, consciousness motivates us. It gives us joy in living and reason to exist. It makes death more poignant and life more holy. It imbues every waking second with significance. And for this reason, he says, we do things that we might not otherwise do -- though we could, conceivably, do them without consciousness. It makes us want to do them.

Humphreys suggests that the joie de vivre that comes with consciousness makes us more playful, more fearful of death, more enamored of art and poetry, more driven to explore and discover, than we otherwise would be -- and that evolution might well select for organisms so motivated. If, perhaps, this motivation could in principle come from some other source in non-conscious organisms (exploratory behavior could be genetically selected, for example), in fact in us it is consciousness that does the work.

I am intrigued by Humphrey's idea that consciousness might be selected not because it underwrites an ability but rather because it provides motivation. Yet I wonder if joie de vivre is indeed the normal state of conscious organisms as Humphrey supposes. Think, for example, of the Buddhist maxim that life is suffering (which seems to me overstated on the other side) and their goal of escaping it into the nothingness of nirvana.