Consciousness: The Hope

We have a shared Constitution—a body, a structure. Now we need a shared mind, and a spinal cord.

He who goes about to reform the world must begin with himself, or he loses his labor. —Ignatius of Loyola

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 fifth installment of this series. The first is here. The second here. The third is here. The fourth is here.

V. The Hope

I should like to say something first—and finally—about the place unto which our new understanding of consciousness can deliver us. Through the mechanism of joint attention, theory of mind, and others, human social consciousness developed—perhaps many times—starting in the Paleolithic and extending to today. Social consciousness is an automatic, 'objective,' We+I–representation of the world—a shared map of our environment and the human conspecifics within it, and as part of it. Leopards, lions, tigers, hyenas, wolves, raptors, snakes, and crocodiles—and their behaviors—become objects of a shared concern. Discovering a new food source, a behavioral pattern in potential prey, and accidental fires become objects of shared advantage. As this species is pressured by climate change, moving into new environments, dwindling numbers, and getting along with other tribes and other humans, it relies more and more heavily on this shared representation of the world to survive and thrive. It begins to fill in this shared map with shared meaning, first on an inferential-emotional-alignment level and then, as the work of human-world building continues, also on a 'linguistic' level, dividing its labor somewhat along gender lines but more along speaker-listener lines. It is the birth of cultural evolution.

Unlike biological evolution, the much more rapid cultural evolution has very few robust places to store its beneficial 'ideas,' so it uses the joint-attentional environment to do so—it writes to the animate and inanimate environment, as well as to other human minds. Co-evolution through (mediated) sexual selection gradually internalizes this, both the cerebral substance of consciousness and its processes. Meanings accumulate through culture and language building, and children born into this space must quickly learn these (developing) meanings. Individual consciousness is what allows them to do so, while also allowing human cultures to cohere, even across great distances.

Thus, social transmissional teaching and learning (informal and formal) is what human consciousness—both social and individual—is for. It is an engine that drives us to create and learn shared meanings within our human culture. Social learning and cultural evolution are the keys to our 'success' as a species. We have not fully appreciated this human superpower until starting very recently—to understate the situation dramatically. When we do step back and appreciate this understanding of consciousness, we suddenly become aware that we are standing in the midst of an enormous mess (again, understating dramatically). Shared meaning, shared knowledge, shared wisdom—these products of social and individual consciousness that provide for shared stakes in our human communities, along with enormous opportunities for creative and effective 'progress'—are, today, grossly unequally distributed, inappropriately transmitted, and distorted and abused by intellectual (writ narrowly and broadly) subcultures that place arbitrary (to truth) obstacles in front of teaching and learning, the latter two being nontrivial causes of the former. We cannot afford to keep things this way. We have to clean up.

I propose a Conscientional Convention—at least for my home country and culture: the United States of America. Here, we have a shared Constitution—a body, a structure. Now we need a shared mind, and a spinal cord. A shared consciousness. Let us take advantage of our momentary ill-fittedness to and disconnection from the constraints of the constitutio to rebuild our minds again, as we did some 100,000 years ago. Let us finally make sense of that phrase 'a more perfect union'. Let us have meaning-based instruction, transmitting shared knowledge and wisdom, from all different cultures and times around the globe. Let us be religious and political, creative and reverent, outward exploring and inward gazing—in the right places and appropriate seasons of life, for apprentices and adult learners as well as children—and let us be guided by science, common sense, and our own growing knowledge about teaching and learning in our building and constant rebuilding of this collective mind. (It's our mind, we can change it.) Let us do this from before Kindergarten to Ph.D. Let us here make reparations for the messes we have made, where we can creatively avoid zero-sum outcomes. Let us here bring haughty, gatekeeping, hoop-jumping academic subcultures to account, enlist their help, and help them in return.

I know we can start. We've done it before.