Consciousness: The Sex
We face this in the same way we always have—via real conversation, with above-board, meaning-based teaching, learning, and action.
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 third installment of this series. The first is here. The second here.
III. The Sex
My view of consciousness in this theory—to both reiterate and expand on material from previous installments—is that it not only provides humans with a kind of pre-technological internet (conscious individual brains 'belonging to,' regulated by, and affiliative toward a common culture can work at great distances from the main group, eventually becoming subcultures) but also a form of pre-technological mixed reality, causing those individual conscious brains to also view the world, both social and natural, as a set of 'potentially culturally affiliative or non-affiliative' entities with which we can interact (or fear). With Nature as 'speaker,' most of the messages (perceptions) from this non-cultural world (consciousness-filtered perception) we find to be, as 'listeners,' affiliatively unaligned to our culture (Nature often doesn't care about us), so we shape them and mold them to make them align. Thus, we can move into any ecological (or social!) niche and make a home of it.
It is not possible, under this view, to examine anyone's consciousness-mixed-reality headset, as it were, and confidently report out the 'gender' of that individual from one's findings—unless he were lying—except possibly at birth today. I describe consciousness in terms of perhaps being skewed one way or the other toward an S-role (speaker role) or L-role (listener role) in general, but even those distinctions are context-specific. Ultimately, gender seems to matter more post-consciousness than pre. Here is what I will be writing about gender in my paper after I edit it:
Much of this view aligns with at least the plain statement of Wrangham's self-domestication hypothesis. And there is no sense in denying that, under this theory, the speaker and listener roles described map—however messily—to what we know to be 'traditional' masculine and feminine conversational-cultural 'roles' across cultures.
But these assignational distinctions (and amplifications thereof) come from already-conscious people (us, the 'modern' observers). In closer-to-the-past-'moment' terms, we simply organized this self-domestication work with what was at hand (ourselves). We can't all talk—or 'move on ourselves'—at once. But we can take turns. And we can, and likely did, do this in very egalitarian (to us, today) ways, with divisions of labor emerging along 'speaker-listener' lines, along with others logically unnecessary to the development of individual consciousness.
Both genders were obviously both speakers (S-role) and listeners (L-role) throughout, but it's the roles that mattered, not the genders of the humans who occupied them. Everyone was a 'listener' shaping everyone as a 'speaker.' The intense cognitive, collaborative, coordinative work in the Middle Paleolithic of establishing joint-representational 'language' and cultural meaning was dependent on ALL humans eventually internalizing how to be a good 'speaker-role' and how to be a good 'listener-role' to grow and keep together (coordinate), and only incidentally about how to be good boys and girls. In fact, we can say that the S-role is a 'teacher' role, and the L-role is that of a 'learner.' We can certainly describe this period as an intense one of coordinative teaching and learning. Everyone was a teacher and a learner.
Over time, we negotiated—with social consciousness—how 'best' to accomplish this 'teaching' and 'learning,' and the psychologically 'natural' way we eventually stumbled on (as outlined above), as evidenced by cross-cultural accounts of S-role and L-role characteristics in contemporary conversation (the only vehicle of teaching and learning), was for the S-role to eventually lay out the entire message for the L-role's simple selective approval. In other words, the optimum that we stumbled on was the transmission model of communication (with adjustments). In the communication environment of the Paleolithic, this was a good turn-taking mutual negotation system. Whenever you were (are) S-role—individually unconsciously—the expectation from L-roles was (is)—individually unconsciously—that the S-role produce a message that has affiliative-alignment markers in it. The L-role's job throughout these negotiations is to prefer messages that culturally align—individually unconsciously.
What this means for individual consciousness, which internalizes social consciousness (the time frame from social to individual consciousness is difficult to pin down) is that they are deeply oriented to some kind of S-role and L-role asymmetry (the wick), which is only lit by the match of the cultural gender-edness of the society they are born into.
This 'wick' part is a further helpful narrowing (along with a generalized 'human-cultural' narrowing) that also helps us learn our culture and stay together in it. Baby boys and girls start to show gender (not genderedness) preferences right around the same time that they start to speak (at the age of two) and they seem to incorporate gender into their language processing as well. But these are more mercurially applied and more mixed S-role and L-role preferences of their consciousnesses, correlated perhaps strongly to (not caused by) ancient 'egalitarian' gender roles. The narrowing 'preferences' along with general human-culture-oriented 'preferences' become our conscious 'selves' through and through—the very eyes through which we (consciously, but not infallibly) see, teach, and learn. We are now furious cultural reproducers and biological ones (or, rather, "twos"): teachers and learners.
This view is something the Victorian Darwin did not see, ultimately (although co-theorist Alfred Russel Wallace did). He wanted to push the 'flow' of natural selection (with sexual dimorphism) past the 'moment' of consciousness, where it simply takes a rear seat to cultural selection.
How far does biological sex or gender, as functional and important, extend beyond the consciousness dividing line? It certainly can be a part of individual and group identity—a fact that we can't simply erase by explanation (scientific or otherwise)—it appears in our languages, with reforms always underway (today the gendered aspect of languages is functionally and psychologically irrelevant to many native speakers), but to the extent that gender mattered in our process of 'humanization,' gender-edness took over after consciousness (the match to the wick).
It is our own important work of teaching and learning, I would argue, to address this, which means, on the one hand, that we can't write off intellectual (and advocacy) work focused intently on gendered social power imbalances (social 'justice'), and on the other, we can't say that anyone who agrees or disagrees with these ideas, in part or in full, suddenly becomes a character in them, protagonist or antagonist. Shared knowledge is not the same thing as a collection of shared inferences or affiliations (or anti-affiliations), but it can look a lot like it on the surface.
We face this in the same way we always have—via real conversation, with above-board, meaning-based teaching, learning, and action that introduces us to sensible meanings outside of ourselves, gives us space to process them, teaches us to re-express the ideas sensibly as a speaker to other listeners, and connects us to the potential for valuable cultural action.
