Consciousness: The End

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Author's Note

I have written a paper that sketches out a theory of consciousness.

What I argue in this paper is that what we call—and feel as individual—human consciousness is the product of co-evolution with a strong sexual selection component. This individual consciousness is an internalization of what I call, following the ideas in (Frith, 2025) [PDF], social consciousness. The internalization of social consciousness along with social consciousness itself made it possible for Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa—indeed, it compelled this migration possibly—some 70,000 to 50,000 years ago and marks a dividing line for the species when cultural evolution begins to operate on ourselves. Consciousness allowed our ancestors to self-domesticate and spread out while maintaining cultural alignment. It operates in the same way in human infants and adults, providing for rapid cultural and language learning and affiliation in the face of noisy environments and enormous poverties of linguistic stimuli.

This is the sixth and zeroth installment of this series. The first is here. The second here. The third is here. The fourth is here. The fifth is here.

0. The End

I remember a particular moment with my father and my twin brother in Garden Plain—here, actually, if you're interested—around our dining room table one evening. My father built that house. The big shed is new, and there's a big enclosed back porch now too, but all the rest—man would I love to be able to live there again. We lost the house when my brother and I were going into late-elementary or early middle school, because of either Reagan or income tax infelicities or both; it hardly matters now.

I know that we moved after 1986, because in 1986, I was sitting on the fence surrounding the compost area slash weed farm—where that shed is now—when my aunt drove up to tell us that my Grandma Violet had a coronary thing (like John Ritter's, I learned much later) and was in the hospital. My other grandparents were suddenly there soon after in the evening (they lived in Dodge City) and had found out from my parents that Grandma Violet had passed away, at 60. But they were told to let my parents break the news. When my parents walked in, the only thing my father could get out was, "Guys, sometimes . . ." before we attacked them and fell together in a circle on our knees—my two younger sisters too—on the living room floor, crying and holding each other. If you could have looked through that big window on the front of the house that night, that's what you would have seen.

Looking toward the stop sign, you can see a culvert, which we always played in, hiding and finding frogs. Out of the sky on another evening, a glider landed in that field past the sign. We got to meet the errant pilot, and I guess we helped him get home. It was a him. If you turn right at that stop sign, and then imagine that big covered back porch area gone, my father was standing just inside the house there, with his back to the sliding glass door, big backyard in view. He was standing next to our dining room table, next to the light above our dining room table, upright piano to his right, our left. We would wheel the TV into that room so my dad could watch M.A.S.H. I remember seeing Gerald Ford once on that TV, and Carter once too—and then a lot of Reagan.

If I were to turn my back on my father in this room, I would be looking at the living room, I could see the big window, with a sofa in front of it, which my grandparents called a davenport. My gaze from the dining room to the living room, then, crossed over the doorless entry to the basement stairs on the right. My brother and I slept in the basement (in a room), and one time I climbed to the top of those stairs and caught my dad lying on top of my mom. They were laughing. Looking into the past, out the big window, from the davenport, you would see my brother and me, still in or just out of diapers maybe, waddling on the path from the driveway past the big window—the night dark and the cold in our breath. We tried but couldn't make it and both pooped our pants at the same time.

It was out the big window that I first saw crime. A group of men in black masks did make it to the front door. My mother's scream—so powerful and unusual that I can't remember it, stopped the robbers from trying to bash the door in, and they took off. If you go out to that dirt road on the side of the house and look to the horizon, the way the front of the house would look at it, you would see my father's white pickup truck and the huge cloud of dust behind it, racing to the rescue. My father's coworker and family relative saw him leave suddenly without a word and followed behind him, leaving his own dust trail.

If you look to the horizon in the other direction—toward town—there was a small bridge down that way, where my father and brother and I slipped on black ice in that pickup truck, now with a red and blue camper top on it. We landed on our side, my nose pressed dangerously hard against the window, which was in contact with road. A neighbor luckily came by in the snow at night and took us home. I've never had M&M hot chocolate that tasted so good.

My father wasn't able to remove the lampshade thing on top of our dining room table light, but he was able to push it up and suspend it out of our way. The light was the Sun, and my father held the Moon and the Earth in his hands. He somehow was able to rotate and revolve both at the same time, at sort of the right speed even, a globe and a baseball, spinning around the dining room light, pushing back the darkness.