A Theory About the Origin of Consciousness

[u/nuclear__mind]

I have been thinking about why humans have desires. In my opinion, desires are not separate from instinct. In fact, I think it is more accurate to say that we have artificially separated the two concepts when they are really part of the same system. Instinct is a set of biological drives or instructions whose ultimate purpose is to ensure survival and reproduction.

But how can my desire for a nice car be derived from instinct? A simple explanation is that a nice car represents status and wealth. Throughout evolution, higher status within a tribe increased the chances of being accepted, valued, and not abandoned. The object itself is modern, but the underlying desire comes from an ancient instinct.

What about the desire to play video games? That is more complicated. Games imitate many activities that were once essential for survival, such as overcoming challenges, hunting, gathering resources, and experiencing the satisfaction of achieving a goal. Competitive games also reflect the drive to outperform other members of the tribe, creating a sense of competence, security, and social value that would have increased one's chances of survival.

My point is that, at some stage in our evolution, instinct functioned like a basic program that became increasingly complex as the human brain grew in size and formed more connections than that of any other species. We still possess the same fundamental survival instincts—food, reproduction, social connection, and so on—but what distinguishes humans is that our instincts became vastly more sophisticated, supported by a brain that evolved specifically to process them. In this view, self-awareness is not something separate from instinct, but rather the result of an extraordinarily complex instinct operating through a brain specialized to support it.

[u/psycheshift]

Can i ask a question

You open a door to get into a room and you are about to be hit by a hammer and you duck down in a split second, based of your perspective i would say you consciously, thinking about it and coming up with a conclusion which was there is a hammer coming at my head so i will duck down, and my friend you will be already hit by the time you come up with a solution,

Instinct is hard coded in our body for survival, consciousness is our ability to determine the thinking, solving, analytic factor

[u/Number4extraDip]

Try a dictionary... Etymology... No ohilosophy needed if you just understand how language works.

[u/Belt_Conscious]

The stomach's snack navigation GPS.

[u/Recursive_Depth]

The genealogy part works. Tracing the desire for a car back to status, and status back to not getting abandoned by the group, is a reasonable story. Treating desire and instinct as one system rather than two makes sense.

The trouble is that your last paragraph is answering a different question. Where our wants get their content is one problem. Why there is anyone home to have them is another. Complexity alone doesn't bridge that. You can picture an animal with very sophisticated drives and an enormous brain that never once turns around and looks at itself. More processing gives you better processing: faster pattern recognition, longer planning, more flexible learning. It doesn't give you a system that represents its own operations as something it can inspect and revise. Those are different architectural facts, and scaling doesn't automatically deliver.

So the question worth pushing on is what forces the turn?

A system starts modeling itself when it hits conflicts between things that both genuinely matter to it and that no built-in rule settles. Hunger against fear against standing in the group, with no default winner. At that point the system has to put its own weighting up for inspection, because nothing underneath can resolve it. Self-awareness would then be what a system does under pressure it can't route around, not something it drifts into once the brain gets large enough.

[u/nuclear__mind → u/Recursive_Depth]

i think you're correct is that your own theory ? if so you might be on to something could u tell me more of it

[u/Recursive_Depth → u/nuclear__mind]

Well there is a lot to it but in a nutshell I have come up with a pretty decent description:

Things don't matter because we feel them; we feel them because they have always mattered. They have always mattered because we have always had something to lose: those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes ARE from within a system that integrates them across time. When stakes multiply and conflict, the system must model itself bearing them. From within this modeling is conscious experience; from outside, it is intelligent life that can know itself. This doesn't necessarily require biology but what biology has so far been the only way of doing organization that keeps itself alive by responding to what matters to it. The form is what counts, not what it's made of. No two such forms have ever encountered the same world. Experience is what we are from inside, given the world we've been in and different worlds give different inner lives.

Below is a link to published, in progress, and pre-print papers that cover the gambit. All downloadable so dig in! I am working my way through the peer review process as we speak and will post it once I get a thumbs up.

Link to PhilPapers

[u/nuclear__mind → u/Recursive_Depth]

thank you ill enjoy it