Evolutionary psychology and consciousness
The main title is “The serpent’s gift,” Chapter 22 of The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). A copy can be found at this link. A copy of this chapter can be found here. The abstract:
“As a higher-order cognitive system enabling access to intentional states, and one that few (if any) other species even marginally possess, consciousness or, more appropriately, self-consciousness has likely been both selectively advantageous and the source of adaptive conflict in human evolutionary history. Consciousness was likely advantageous to early human beings because it built on more ancient primate social adaptations. Individuals likely profited by having the capacity to track the intentions of the self and of social others in that consciousness permitted behavioral strategies involving deception and declarative communication. However, consciousness was likely also a source of adaptive conflict in that it interfered with the functioning of more ancient social adaptations, such as infanticide and male sexual coercion of females. Having access to the epistemic states of others meant that knowledge of social transgressions could be rapidly conveyed between parties. For many evolved psychological mechanisms, what was adaptive in human ancestral history suddenly became maladaptive when consciousness appeared.”
The section entitled “self consciousness as an epiphenomenon” (600) details things we’ve heard from Paul. E.g. it shadows intuitive adaptations with no causal role and merely provides post hoc and irrelevant explanations. The author agrees that many adaptations are indeed of this variety, but that self-consciousness also plays a role in many others.
The explanations of our intentions and actions, all communicated in accord with the dynamic content of our conscious, “adaptively subjective dreamworld” (i.e., our situationally optimized sense of internal and external reality) are not at all irrelevant. /// The nonconscious mental mechanisms that produce these strategically warped, salient, and therefore efficiently communicable versions of reality, are magnificently sophisticated adaptations for successful social navigation. They are in constant use by modern humans; this is why social interactions, even if pleasant (i.e., successful), can leave us exhausted. /// These non-conscious cognitive adaptations, I guess by definition, operate with near total transparency, even though,… Read more »
I do NOT think self-consciousness as it now exists in humans is epiphenomenal. It now is a direct product of natural selection built to be a social navigation tool. At this point in our evolution, it is a multi-faceted, well-integrated, meta-adaptation, in my view. It represents our “adaptively subjective dreamworld.” However, like many other human cognitive traits, like the many instincts or cognitive biases that support our (somewhat contingent) obsession with religion and the paranormal, human consciousness probably has epiphenomenal evolutionary ORIGINS, probably beginning in early hominid ancestors. Thanks for the references you are posting, Ed. — PJW
New Study shows that the Creative Brain is Wired Differently. Feb 18, 2018 Albert Einstein once said “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” It is well known that creative people see the World differently, but now researchers have discovered one possible reason for why. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists studying brain scans of people who were asked to come up with inventive ways to use everyday objects were able to see a specific pattern of connectivity that correlated with the most creative responses.… Read more »
“We make no claims that people’s explanations for their own behaviors must be correct (i.e., biologically relevant) for self-consciousness to have been a meaningful component of natural selection. Because there is overwhelming evidence that people do not understand the biological relevance of their own adaptive behaviors evolutionary psychologists rightly reject this notion of propositional veracity. This is typically what evolutionary psychologists are referring to when they state that self-consciousness has had little to do with the evolution of adaptive human behaviors. People do not need to know why they do what they do in order to behave adaptively. The capacity… Read more »
I agree up to here: “This is typically what evolutionary psychologists are referring to when they state that self-consciousness has had little to do with the evolution of adaptive human behaviors.”
It is true that some EP’s think that self-consciousness is maladaptive or adaptively neutral. That is stupid. To the extent that self-consciousness is part of the larger the “adaptively subjective dreamworld” we live in, it has been a key feature of intrapsychic design affecting the evolution of all kinds of crucial social navigation adaptations in humans. — Paul
Also recall how they defined consciousness at the beginning of the paper (598): “That naturally occurring cognitive representational capacity permitting explicit and reflective accounts of the – mostly causative – contents of mind, contents harbored by the psychological frame of the self and, as a consequence, also the psychological frames of others.”
The conscious accounts are adaptively warped. Yet, they are a product and more or less perverted (usu. more) reflection of the constantly updated causal nonconscious model of reality that runs an individual. — Paul