Consciousness: Illusion of control…
I think the evolution of consciousness is a tricky subject because consciousness exists in the brain and the brain is super complex. There are millions of neurons coordinating, activating and communicating with endless results and most of the actions that happen in the brain have nothing to do with consciousness as we understand it. The idea that humans are the only animal with a form of consciousness is highly debated but I would like to be open to the fact that many other animals have a similar set of brain states that, if we could analyze them, would be called consciousness. Consciousness to me is the inner monologue and overall processing that produces recallable memories as well as a linear basis for the continuity that allows for the notion of a self. Consciousness is the ability to communicate with ourselves and with others. Consciousness is the NOW that we are constantly working to understand and legitimize through to create a workable space to live in and consciousness is, to me, the illusion of control.
A long time ago in our evolution something changed in our biological ability to communicate in a way that would lead to a major change in our social lives. Primates are social animals and rely on social cooperation to succeed in surviving and propagating the species. Animals learn in many different ways and I believe that humans began to learn by means of verbal and visual communication strategies. These began as simple grunts and gestures and then evolved slowly to include more variability in individual sounds to represent more and more real world ideas. As language progressed humans began to draw pictures to teach other about practical things such as solving problems like hunting or determining when to go to safety. The teaching and communicating of ideas is what I think led to our eventual formation of complex language and to what we call consciousness.
So what happened in humans to create this major change in social development? I think it was a combination of a biological singularity that allowed humans the possibility to use an excess of neurons for more and more novel uses and an environment that promoted rapid adaptation and social cooperation. Also, the close proximity of young to their parents in primates living in a harsh environment may have led to the opportunity and need to teach children in more and more effective ways, thus drawing and clarifying language may be a product of these types of interacting circumstances.
As language developed in ancient humans the growing complexity of individual representations used in language would necessitate memorization and practice to ensure the continuation of teaching strategies from generation to generation. Through this memorization and practice the brain may have become better and better at internalizing these language parts and utilizing part of the brain’s processing faculties to this task and therefore a stream of consciousness developed. Now I can imagine that once the ability to memorize language and think internally about the world might allow for a revolution in humanity because now an individual with a good grasp of the language could better teach new things they learned as well as make plans about the future. The ability to plan things and think about the world on a timeline is thought of as a characteristic of human consciousness and something that separates us from the rest of animals and I think that it was the need for communication that led to all of humanities new abilities.
So where does control come in to play and what about free will? Well, I think that we take free will for granted but it is not such a simple concept. While I admit that we are responsible for our actions we are completely limited by our current environment and our biological proclivities. We only have free will as long as we do not expect to be free to do anything at all. We have the ability to make a limited number of choices based on a limited numbers of current possibilities. This is where determinism comes from and the idea that if we knew all the factors down to the individual relationships between atoms and physical forces we could determine every possible outcome and therefore nothing is really free. I believe there is truth is the concept of determinism but what I think is more important is the idea of quantum chaos or the law of uncertainty that makes a rift between the possibilities we can postulate and the actual happenings in reality.
There is a level of unpredictability to everything but we still have the unending need to create patterns and consistencies to understand and navigate the world. We attempt to focus our thinking and simplify the data to make decisions and we are often rushed or do not have the time to really contemplate the reality of our predicaments. So when we make decisions we have already predicted the outcome and due to the limited number of possibilities we are often times correct, which goes to reify the concept of control as well as reinforcing the strategy used in the previous prediction. Also, we concentrate on outcomes that are consistent with our predictions and gloss over the outcomes that are confusing or otherwise unpredicted which only furthers the idea that we have control because we disregard this useless information. This illusion of control also leads to self-confidence, which is one of the most attractive traits to humans, which suggests how it is evolutionarily positive to use language to predict and manage life’s problems and to advertise one’s own predictive abilities.
So, there is a lot going on in the conscious mind of men and women but it is not necessarily important for humans to have free will in the classical sense. I think that biological creatures such as humans are products of three things: the environment, the individual’s biology and chemistry, and the constant process of data acquisition, filtration and analyzation of information. Consciousness is now a super complex form of a once simple tool for communication but control is a kind of useful illusion to give meaning to events and allow for patterns to emerge from very complicated circumstances. We are limited by our senses and we are controlled by no one thing. I like to think of the brain as a mess of wires that are all connected at millions of crossroads and consciousness is just another electrical line weaving its way through the mess like a twisting and morphing snake, never ceasing and impossible to catch.
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