Consciousness: The Qualia
By NickRewind, CC BY 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=140778614
Individual consciousness is not learned, it is inherited, and it enables and powers human social-cultural learning.
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 fourth installment of this series. The first is here. The second here. The third is here.
IV. The Qualia
What began, then, in the Paleolithic with social consciousness and then internalized individual consciousness was the process of social, transmissive teaching and learning—human social learning, our species' superpower. We have the key criteria for this theory of consciousness: (1) Species-universality and reliable development. Individual consciousness appears in every human and functions under normal rearing conditions, even with minimal environmental input. Individual consciousness is not learned, it is inherited, and it enables and powers human social-cultural learning, (2) Ancestral selective advantage. Social (and individual) consciousness enhanced group survival as the need for humans to enlarge and organize their groups and collaborate with others to coordinate around shared meanings became an inevitable survival reality, and individual consciousness prepares new arrivals (babies and strangers) to learn the ways of their new culture—we are not "little scientists," we are "little anthropologists"—very rapidly as children but throughout our lives as well, and (3) Design features consistent with the adaptive function. The global workspace theory aligns with the dual 'speaking-listening' neuroscientific design of consciousness presented in this theory. On larger scales, and the social side, as mentioned, babies and infants are able to acquire their parent culture rapidly, even with minimal input (the same problem we faced as a group in the Paleolithic), conversational roles tend to be, cross-culturally, skewed heavily toward listener selectivity, the slight delay between unconscious and conscious intention investigated by Libet, etc. These can be explained in terms of this filter-redirect process of consciousness—one that converts perceptions and ideas (increasingly, from the point of view of the consciousness holder) from waves of polysemic impressions to human-aligned, culture-aligned potential meanings. Even though, earlier, we slept in the trees, with consciousness, we now see the tree as being, in part, 'good place for us to sleep.' It is difficult to understate the benefit, in time-savings alone, that consciousness provides for social learning.
But the transmission model we 'built,' we must not forget, was not made to magically appear. It was built on top of an already existing inferential-alignment channel, where 'speaking' and 'listening' are regulated by joint-attentional feelings of emotional alignment (empathy). Our linguistic coordinativity (and certainly expressiveness) is inseparable from our inferential-emotional communication. Modulatable, but not separable.
Consciousness is also, of course, something we experience, and how we experience it is important. That is, it is important to notice that we notice it. We talk about it and wonder about it. A theory that purports to explain consciousness as I do must, then, on some level, convince you that its analysis leads to a view of individual consciousness that resonates with yours—a picture of the subjective, qualitative aspect of conscious experience, the 'pink'ness of 'pink,' the 'watering-hole'ness of watering hole, the 'what it feels like' elements of human experience known in philosophy as qualia. Below I attempt to apply this theory to (and re-explain it in terms of) qualia.
Why do we have a subjective experience of 'pink,' say? Well, first, let's change that question to this statement: 'experience of pink'. Now evacuate all the words from it and leave the experience. Still 'pink experience' to you. You still get it. I do too. Remember, there are no words here—I'm using them as a vehicle to paint the picture, but our 'inferentially shared' experience at this moment when you 'experience pink' is roughly 'objectively' the same as mine (with joint attention). But we are inferentially aligned still mostly because of our linguisticness—we separately learned to conversationalize or culturalize 'experience of pink' long ago, and now we are coming together pretending that we just both sort of 'know' what the 'experience of pink' is. So, we have to take away all that too.
We have to be together in a tribe in the Middle Paleolithic where we both (all) have an allegedly shared, almost totally unconversationalized inference around this pre-linguistic 'experience of pink'. This is getting a little strange, but your imagination can still keep up with this. The 'experience of pink' obviously would not be a high priority to conversationalize, but you can just imagine something important like 'watering hole' as a substitute. The point is to remember, as you sit there in your new tribe, that pre-linguistic inferential joint-attentional alignment is what we used, successfully, to 'communicate,' patchily for a long time.
Now, though, erase joint attention. Joint attention (which forms an 'objective' We-representation), without 'language,' creates a space where 'pink' and 'watering hole' (as more or less 'objective' to the tribe) can be inferentially aligned around, with the corresponding alignment feelings. Prior to this, 'pink' or 'watering hole' were just things that humans coincidentally aligned around. The organism that is 'you' goes to the place where you get water because you're thirsty, and everyone else does it too, of course, and you notice.
When you try to place yourself back in the Middle Paleolithic and imagine yourself, pre-conscious, looking at 'pink', it seems impossible to you that you, personally, could not have something like 'experience of pink' and still be human. But you didn't, and you still are. Your organism's perceptual machinery is in order, your organism still 'perceives' pink in the sense that your retinas work and your occipital lobe functions and you can resolve that frequency of color.
Once joint attention comes along, you can behave in more complex cognitive socially conscious ways with this perception. You can gesture (dance) to suggest a shared meaning of 'pink', adjust your vocal pitch (sing), act out, imitate—everybody's so creative (but naturally domain-specific; you wouldn't try to 'dance' the meaning of 'pink'). These experiences count as qualia too—short-range 'wave' qualia, unspoken 'objectified' inferential alignments with other tribe members (their 'messages'); the linguistic-content-free feelings of unspoken alignment which served (and serve) as communicative signals.
Once we start, as communities, to grow larger, grow apart, and grow together, feelings will no longer do to keep us together. An intense period of selecting for 'linguistic' and 'inferential-emotional' communicative success has begun. Joint attention started it (and joint attention itself is a coordination-problem solution, so we imagine this period as also focused on selecting for coordinative communicative success).
Self-assembling into speaker and listener roles and moving them gradually or quickly toward the structure they have today, the work of assembling 'language,' but more accurately 'shared meanings and culture' proceeds as Dor describes it: creating joint representations in a (growing) 'symbolic space'. Now we discover, by engaging in this frenetic period of trying to create highly coordinative joint representations for our growing, joining, spreading communities that not everyone has the same joint-attentional 'shared' inference about 'pink'. Or, most importantly, we could find that we all have the same inference-level feeling about it, but we now have to jointly use (coordinate around) 'pink'—we have to jointly use the watering hole; we can no longer separately use the watering hole on the feeling-honor-system maintainably. The 'feeling' by itself was okay for a while (and it can hang around, because it can be put to good uses) but now we need a joint representation of 'pink' that we can all explicitly, in some sense, agree to—a 'human-culture-oriented' stance on 'pink'.
This is the full 'feeling-knowing' of consciousness (qualia) which results from its function: a random thought-message has gone through your speaker brain (as they do), like unconscious 'pink' stimulated from the environment, and your consciousness—your mute internal listener—aligns to it and 'hears' it, sending a feeling back your way (the feeling of 'conscious of this'). But "this" doesn't exist (much) to the listener. It really doesn't care, thankfully, about what 'pink' is at all. It only cares about cultural alignment, affiliativity, human-centered use, etc. Consciousness is wired such that, even if you're experiencing qualia like 'pink' for the very first time, you will almost helplessly feel-see it in a human-cultural-centric way. That's why, to adults, consciousness seems like just a kind of 'narrowing or damping' 'feeling' they were inexplicably born with. You, as an adult, become conscious of 'pink' in the same way as a baby does; but the concept is already mostly culturalized in adults, so, especially out of context (just sitting there having an experience of 'pink' and wondering where it comes from) what you mostly get from your individual 'consciousness' is this seemingly mysterious low-hum alignment reverberance with yourself and the outside world.
For babies though, consciousness narrows the range of baby perceptions and thoughts to a kind of culturally aligned world. It becomes conscious (of 'dog', say, to an outside omniscience, or 'pink') because this element is something the internal listener picks out from the environment as something culturally affiliative—possible to make cultural sense of. It does that for everything. The baby (just like its ancestors) needs to know more: what is it (to my culture and me)? how does it work (for my human culture and me)? what's its name (that my culture and I can talk about it with)? how do we (me, you, and our sapiens-reality) coordinate around this? (This is why we often produce 'cultural' responses after becoming conscious of, say, 'pink,' even as adults: "Nice pink, would you call that king salmon?") If the baby had to negotiate all of its thoughts and perceptions this way, it would take too long to learn its culture, and it would take too long to learn about any element in that culture. A baby's consciousness lights up its world in a human-affiliative way in order that it may rapidly adopt its parent-human language and culture.
Once we have consciousness and culture, as our babies surely do, we can have very strange, culturally fast, evolutionarily instant joint-representational agreements around 'pink' that we can do so much with, and feel so much about: color, girl, salmon, health ('be in the pink'), sunset. Replace 'pink' with 'watch' for a moment and come across one lying in a field, even as a Paleolithic human: the watch will appear even to that human as humanly designed because he is conscious. In fact, a lot of things will likely appear to these early humans as humanly designed—if the source seems to be a mystery, yet the design is culturally useful, like fire, these early humans may have sat around one eventually, virtually certain amongst themselves that it was ultimately created by a beneficent but vicious, invisible, human-like intelligence or force. There are many routes to take from here. But it would be nearly impossible for them not to look at themselves and infer that they were designed, feet for kicking and hearts for thinking—whenever they had the luxury of free time to ponder that question.
