Consciousness: The Ghost in the Machine

human consciousness that's the riddle what is consciousness for why did it evolve sometimes I thought there's no way of getting to an answer you take this way or that this one to blind alley that one leads back where you began consciousness is a mystery and a problem perhaps the biggest remaining problem in philosophy and biology too I want to get as close to an answer as I can I mean by consciousness the inner picture we each have of what it is like to be ourselves self-awareness the presence in each of us of a spirit a self a soul which we call eye it's I who have thoughts and feelings sensations memories desires my body may be fast asleep but I persist perhaps at this very moment and dreaming this is the person I call I is thinking thinking about what it might feel like not to have this kind of inner consciousness presumably it wouldn't feel like anything at all machines don't feel things they just do things thus surely in their sons in which machines are self-aware cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am in the 17th century the French philosopher Descartes wondered whether there was anything he or anyone else could be absolutely sure of yes he could be sure that he had conscious thoughts and feelings the one and only solid fact was the presence of the ghost in the machine consciousness is a part of human nature but for Descartes it was more than that it was a sign of our closeness to God no other animal had been thus favoured my dog in de cartes fuel not only lacks a soul he completely lacks a conscious mind I used to think that Descartes ideas were nonsense surely consciousness and the brains activity are inseparably linked how could we act at all if we weren't conscious then in Cambridge in the 1960s I became involved in an experiment which quite shook me up and made me take nothing in this area for granted anymore this monkey helen is acting as if she can see but the part of her brain which would allow her to see in the way we understand seeing has been destroyed samia's before I took this film Helens visual cortex was removed as part of a study of the effects of brain damage in human beings but the lower centers of her brain was still intact and I thought it just possible she might possess a capacity for vision of which she herself was unaware I coaxed her and encouraged her I played with her and took her for walks in the fields near the laboratory I tried in every way to persuade her that she wasn't blind I know she could steer her way deftly between obstacles and pick up tiny bits of chocolate from the floor to a stranger she'd have appeared to be quite normal I was sure she wasn't normal I knew her too well knew how much effort her recovery had cost her I was beginning to think that Helen was in a strange way unaware of her own capacity for vision your perhaps was an example of an animal behaving quite unconsciously are you ready trial number 33 good and then a few years later the possibility of unconscious vision was confirmed remarkably in human beings themselves eager eyes trial number 30 grams eyes are perfectly normal but he had a car accident which damaged part of the visual centers of his brain so far as he is concerned he has no awareness of seeing anything over to his right hand side astonishingly his brain can still see things in the blind half of his field of vision he says he's just guessing where the object is soil but he gets it right yelling every time consciously he's blind these blind sight cases are a little disturbing they demonstrate more dramatically than any logical argument that Descartes might have been right all along behavior and consciousness don't necessarily go together the fact that a man or an animal is acting as if he were conscious is no guarantee that he is maybe the idea is not so peculiar many people know what it's like to drive a car without being conscious of the route some of us perhaps have walked in our sleep a sleepwalker may do quite complicated things and even hold a simple conversation without waking up even when we're awake much of our behavior may be more automatic than we realized and if Freud was right what about the ever-present influence of our subconscious minds someone may behave as if they are in love and yet denied they may be influenced by terrible memories they can't recall they act accordingly and don't know why but if that's so if much of behavior and perhaps in principle all of it could occur unconsciously what is consciousness doing why do we have it at all some scientists have claimed that consciousness is no more than a meaningless side product of the brains activity once the machinery is immersion the music plays and the sons themselves have no influence on the machinery perhaps like a mechanical piano our brains just happen to sing out a conscious tune for no purpose just music in the air imagine a machine equipped with sophisticated sensors and a truly complex electronic brain it could have instincts memories the ability to learn predict and take decisions surely it could appear to be conscious of its thoughts and feelings but if a machine can duplicate an animal's behavior then logically who's to say that animals themselves are not in fact unconscious machines that just happen to be made of living tissue and if we choose to believe otherwise isn't that only because we human beings are encouraged ibly sentimental of course we are inclined always to be generous and to see evidence of consciousness even were there's nothing to confirm it but sentiment apart there's really no compelling reason to suppose that termites for example are anything other than unconscious robots soft machines no one yet knows how to build a beetle but are the engineering principles insuperable even with a chameleon suppose a mechanical genius set out to make one that'd be no need to introduce an erratically new principle into the design no need to introduce a conscious mind does a cheater look in on itself and notice its own states of mind does the cheetah fuel exhilaration and the Antelope feel pain when an animal is fighting for its life it may indeed behave as if it's feeling trapped or terrified but to behave in a terrified way and to be consciously aware of feeling terrified are two quite different things the same must go for pain what we know is that animals show pain behavior they struggle cry try to avoid the same thing happening again biologically one of the first tasks of an animal's nervous system is to help protect his owner from further injury pain behavior must have evolved very early on but that doesn't mean that conscious awareness evolved with it no one can doubt that the fish's brain the signaling for all it's worth that something's badly wrong the alarm bells must be ringing telling the fish's body to take action but when a shop window is broken or the building catches far the alarm bells also ring no one thinks that the shop is feeling pain do we have to believe that this fish is in any way consciously aware of what's going on Descartes might well have said I suffer therefore I am pain is so overwhelmingly real and experienced to human beings that it must seem absurd to ask whether or not other creatures share it what would be missing if people felt no pain perhaps nothing except this we wouldn't understand our own or anyone else's suffering unless we dealt it ourselves thought about it reflected on it we might never be able to guess what pain behavior means does that begin to suggest a use for consciousness a possible answer to what human consciousness is for Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859 ever since then to ask what something as fall has had a very particular significance almost everything in nature has a purpose Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is by far the best explanation of how things in nature have come to be the way they are the millions of variations of structure color behavior and so on that occur in the natural world are all there for a good reason and the reason is survival in the competition for food mates and the raring of offspring random mutations which benefit the organism are preserved any others are lost so everything that's been kept on and that means everything we find today is there because it works few people have been prepared to ask how consciousness might fit into this Darwinian scheme like Descartes Darwin believed at one time that consciousness must be in some way supernatural a god-given addition to the general order and therefore outside the scope of scientific explanation but if Darwin was right about the evolution of everything else then surely consciousness can be examined in the same light as any other natural faculty or structure like horns or claws if consciousness evolved by natural selection it must be bringing some kind of biological advantage and that means it must be making some practical difference to our lives what's the most difficult thing that people have to do surely it's to deal with the most complex unpredictable and potentially self-interested creatures on the earth other human beings everyone has to be a skilled psychologist just to stay alive that learn to negotiate a maze of personal relationships and yet everyone does it all the time without giving it a thought is that the clue to what consciousness is fallen is that people can't see the cigar store now understanding other people is a remarkable business consider for example what it means simply to be in conversation with another human being Oh what why do you think that is I mean why is that I mean is it just because people are lazy today or they're bored I mean are we just like bored spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they're just thinking well what can I do okay yes we aboard we're all bored now but has it ever occurred to you Wally that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing without consciousness language itself is hardly conceivable that learn the easy and commonplace exchange of mental concepts the subtlest boredom say or brainwashing and somebody who's asleep will not say no see I keep meeting these people I mean just a few days ago I met this man and I greatly admires a Swedish physicist Christiaan strand and he told me that he no longer watches television he doesn't read newspapers and he doesn't read magazines he's completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now a nightmare what sunlight man so many of our words seem to refer to things which aren't public property but exist only in our heads thoughts dreams moods remarkably one person understands what another person means he said to me where are you from and I said in New York he said I New York yes that's a very interesting place do you know a lot of New Yorkers if you're talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do and I said oh yes and he said why do you think they don't leave I gave him different banal theories he said theories about other people theories about ourselves the very idea of being oneself is a peculiar concept imagine a language which didn't contend the one word I imagined a conversation in which you couldn't rely on the other person being an eye and sharing all these psychological ideas pride hope interest fear of death see I think it's quite possible but the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now that from now on they'll simply be all these robots walking around feeling nothing thinking nothing and they'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts and that history and memory so we share a common language of the mind we interpret other people as familiar bodies and familiar souls every one is a natural psychologist yes but how the human beings learn so much about human psychology so quickly within a few years of birth how do we do it it's one thing to notice the external facts another to read beneath the surface and make sense of what we see we have to make a picture a conceptual model of what goes on inside a human mind to be able to see the hidden presence of plans intentions emotions memories only then can we claim to understand the behavior of our fellow human beings but where could such a model come from a model of the human mind must be in effect a model of the human brain and the human brain is unimaginably complex probably the most complex mechanism in the universe is it really at all likely that any ordinary person could build up a model of the brain just by intelligent observation of how human beings behave would anyone ever have the time the patience or the scientific genius it would undoubtedly require the history of academic psychology makes it quite clear that it can't be done that way Pavlov was convinced the both human and animal behavior could be studied in tally from outside the future for scientific psychology lay in making endless careful observations of how animals and people respond to external stimuli under laboratory conditions from the data it should be possible to construct theoretical models of the workings of the brain models which might account for everything which could be seen from the outside for Pavlov and the later behaviourists the great thing was strict objectivity scientifically the approach was impeccable in intention and design practically it didn't get very far no amount of outside observation could ever tell me what things taste like or what it's like to read a book I never have stayed on the outside if I understand this situation it's not from looking at its from looking in upon myself by ignoring insight the behaviorists were ignoring the most powerful tool imaginable for doing psychology an NR I which looks in on our own brains imagine the brain of an unconscious animal it's connected to sense organs which monitor the outside world and to affect our organs which allow it to operate in and on its environment but still this animal is unconscious has no insight into anything that's happening inside its brain now imagine that at some time in history a new kind of sense organ evolves and NRI whose field of view is the workings of the brain itself it summarizes and reports back to the brain on how the brain itself is operating that's consciousness that's what we seem to have every intelligent action is accompanied by the awareness of the thought processes involved every perception by an accompanying sensation every emotion by a feeling yet how strange it is my thoughts and feelings don't seem to be a picture of my brain if a scientist would look inside my head he'd find millions of nerve cells passing electrical impulses to and fro what I see with my inner eye is me my conscious self by a kind of magical translation and shown my own brain States as conscious states of mind I'm presented with a picture of my brain which I can understand suppose we human beings are the only animals in nature to have evolved this kind of NRI what would it mean for our ability to understand behavior it would mean that each of us has literally a head-start in reading our own minds more than that this inner picture we have of why and how we act could form the basis for explaining other people too we could imagine what it's like to be them because we know what it's like to be ourselves there's a painting by ilya repin that hangs in a moscow gallery how do we as natural psychologists read a scene like this the painting has the title they did not expect him this is how I find myself interpreting it a man still in his coat dirty boots enters a drawing room the maid is apprehensive she could close the door but she doesn't she wants to see how he's received the grandmother stands alarmed as though she's seen a ghost the younger woman eyes wide registers delighted disbelief the girl taking her cue from the grown-ups is suddenly shy only the boy shows open pleasure who is he perhaps the father of the family where's he been the man's eyes tired and staring telephone nightmare from which his only beginning to awake the painting represents as it happens a Russian political prisoner who's been released from the Tsar's jails and come back home On the Waterfront is a great film take out the soundtrack on what's left who are the real artists here it's us we fill in the picture from our own experience we see their inner feelings pain anxiety encouragement compassion willpower we can't help doing it it's so easily done that we take this ability for granted yet none of it would be possible if we weren't able first to look in on ourselves we try to do what chance did the rest of unconscious Nature have imagine the biological benefits to the first of our ancestors who developed the ability to make realistic guesses about the inner life of their fellow human beings the ability to see other people as versions of themselves trust cooperation new forms of social organization became possible and with it the shared exploitation of the environment does all this mean we are alone on the planet the only ones who have these thoughts and feelings self awareness self knowledge insight into ourselves and others who is conscious and who isn't consciousness will not have evolved unless it's needed if the inner eye evolved as a tool for doing psychology then animals which don't need to do psychology don't need an inner eye they don't need to be conscious how about the social insects a beehive is an intricate community in which plenty of calculations must be made but there's nothing psychologically complex here worker bees are so closely related to each other that individual problems rivalry jealousy guilt and so on just don't come in the same must be true for most other animals on earth they don't need to be conscious so the chances are they're not then which species if any are likely to have evolved and in our eye only those which need to sustain lasting intimate and difficult relationships with one another some of the higher social mammals dolphins wolves elephants baboons are promising candidates for consciousness but their social arrangements are still primitive compared to the only animals we know are conscious namely human beings themselves the exception has to be chimpanzees it's scarcely conceivable that these individuals are not self-aware that they don't make imaginative guesses about what their fellow animals are feeling and thinking chimpanzees are capable of social wheeling and dealing at a level not found in any other animal a capable of deceit cheating cooperation and altruism chimpanzees have been observed to weigh up situations as if from another chimpanzees point of view and to modify their own behavior on the basis of how they must appear to someone else they seemed not only to be self-aware but aware that other chimpanzees are self-aware there's another thing chimpanzees can recognize their own reflection in a mirror and that it's been argued is proof positive that they have an inner sense of self when I see myself in a mirror I know it's me I'm well aware over the presence of myself behind that face and I can use the mirror to show me what I look like so can chimpanzees but apart from the great apes and maybe whales all other species fail this mirror test even dogs why does this leave me and my dog I'd like to believe that he is conscious but what I need is some kind of evidence that he can put his consciousness to use does he ever use his own mind as a model for understanding mine he seems to fuel so many human things my guilt hope sadness but does he ever use his awareness of those feelings to interpret my behavior this journey that began with Helen maybe leading to some uncomfortable conclusions Descartes believed there were no other conscious animals on earth he went too far yet chimpanzees gorillas whales there's very species most likely to be our cousins in consciousness are increasingly threatened by man's hand with extinction our human beings then destined to become conscious inhabitants of an otherwise totally unconscious world it depends what you think about the potential of robots and computers human beings are destroying one kind of life but they're creating others I don't think we need worry if war is the right word but any existing machine approaches consciousness but why not one day a conscious machine a robot with its own machine best in our eye that inspects its own mind its own thoughts and shows insight into other robots like itself suppose we were to understand as we don't null the detailed physiology and programming of our own brains could we then play the role of God and give consciousness to n animate machines wouldn't such conscious robots always be mere simulations never the real thing the computer plays chess well but it has no feelings of its own and it doesn't of course know anything of mine yet strangely enough it helps me to think I am playing against a conscious human adversary I can imagine the computer wants to beat me but it's trying to conceal its own intentions and it's hoping to trick me into making a false move this sentimental fallacy may help me play a better game perhaps it isn't always a mistake to see consciousness while logically it doesn't belong no one gives us permission to attribute consciousness even to other human beings but from childhood on we learn to do it because in practice it works wonders for our understanding of how other people think adapt if it works wonders for our understanding of the nonhuman world as well so much the better the mystic the poet or any ordinary person who animates nature by the power of his own mind and feels himself in sympathy with every living thing is not in error for nothing which helps us to relate to and interpret our environment can be an error to understand what Nick Humphries saying I think you could understand what he's reacting against there's a view around that consciousness is private it's an inner world which each person has sole access and it's somehow supernatural it lifts us above nature now Nick Humphries saying on the contrary this is a Darwinian age we've got to think in naturalistic terms we've got to explain all human mental capacities as products of evolution as Darwin himself you would have to come and therefore consciousness has now got to be seen as social it has to do with communication and it's a natural phenomenon all biological questions must be approached in a Darwinian framework it is the Darwinian framework that makes sense of everything about life and consciousness quite clearly is a manifestation of life so that's the first thing he's obviously approaching the question in the right way because he's asking a Darwinian kind of question I must say I do like he the particular answer that he gives within the Darwinian framework - if only because it has to me the feeling of being big enough to do a difficult job I mean we got a very difficult problem consciousnesses I suppose the outstanding problem remaining for biology and just as Darwin's solution to the problem of how we all got here must have had the smell of being big enough to do the job at the time so this has to me the feeling of being a big theory for a big problem well I think it's a philosophical theory rather than at this stage something that's obviously testable by experiment it seems to me a good and useful theory of a certain kind of consciousness which is explicitly self-consciousness or self-awareness I think that's what his thesis is about actually it's about the consciousness of self and I think he makes a very good case out for his thesis that probably only human beings and certain other animals chimpanzees perhaps have this form of self-awareness we become aware of other people when we learn language and particularly where we learn to use the pronouns I me myself mind you yours and so on and I think consciousness arises out of language because we use language in order to draw other people's attention to our desires our wants our projects our intentions and so forth and we've got to get other people's cooperation in order to survive although you may need to have a fairly sophisticated brain to outsmart a predator or prey you need and I think this is probably an account for his main point you need an even smarter brain in order to outsmart another human being and why you should want to outsmart another human being is because their rivals they're the most severe rivals you have in in any species most of selection is between members of the same species so the enemy is very largely members of one's own species they are rivals for resources for mates for status and so on and if those rivals are themselves exceedingly complicated beings and therefore in order to outsmart them you need to be able to be one jump ahead in a very sophisticated and complicated way then his theory of the inner eye looking in upon your own brain and working out what the other person might do by looking in it yourself and saying well what would I do in those circumstances does seem as I say to have the ring of sense we start out with a fairly simple term like conscious we know what being conscious means it means not being asleep or not being not being dead then we create an abstract noun from it consciousness and we've immediately got a thing that we start to look for and if people go wandering around in the brain with electrodes looking the consciousness and failing to find it there they're simply in the position of somebody who say wanders around in the House of Commons are looking for government and failing to find it it's not the sort of thing that you would expect to find in the brain it's just an abstract noun that the language is created I have no idea what an inner I would actually look like I mean it clearly isn't an organ with a lens and a retina that you could de set out of the brain in the way that you can dissect out the eye that's looking outwards I don't think I really have a view about what the inner eye actually means that I'm not sure whether he does either I do think that even before you start having to be a natural psychologist any animal that needs to do fairly sophisticated computational job in order to get around its world is going to have to simulate a model of its world in its own head a computer simulation so when any animal looks at an object I suggest that what it's doing is really looking at a simulated model of that object inside its head and isn't performing manipulations upon that simulated object a bat for example which as you know finds its way around by echoes it's lives in a purely sound world and can scarcely see at all if I were to try to imagine what it might like to what it might be like to be about if we thought that bats had consciousness at all then I suspect that it might be very like seeing for us I think that when when about here's its way around a room what it has to do is to set up a simulated model which is convenient for finding its own way around in three-dimensional space and the kind of model that you need for finding your way around three-dimensional space is the same whether the information that used to set up that model comes in in the form of light rays or sound waves so that's just setting up the idea that many an animal may have in some sense inside its head a computer simulation of its world now that doesn't mean that it would be a conscious simulation it doesn't mean that it would be a conscious imagining of the world in the same way as Nick Humphrey is talking about but I suppose it might in some sense be an evolutionary precursor if you already got a model of the outside world which you're using to guide your way around it the next step would be to place your own body in that model of the three-dimensional world and I suppose it's but one further step to turn inwards and model the actual thought processes itself to have a model of the model one of the things has happened since Darwin is that we've got an enormous Lee stronger sense of our solidarity with the whole of the animal and plant kingdoms the animals really are our kin of course we've got a lot of inherited attitudes to animals we keep some as pets we eat others we kill some as vermin we've got some in zoos and so on we've got a chaotic set of rules for dealing with animals inherited from the past and we've not yet worked out a new ethic for the way we treat animals I think that'll have to come and it'll have to be more in touch with the facts of evolutionary biology notice how Nick stressed that our treatment of Wales and the primates has been particularly bad we've been exterminating them and yet these are the creatures who in their capacities or perhaps closest to ourselves it does worry me if anybody took this idea as a license for being unkind to other species if anybody thought well it's only a machine so it doesn't matter what we do with it we can stick hooks through it or whatever it is but very least it seems to me we should give animals have benefit of the doubt whenever the possibility arises we should remember that a Martian visiting earth looking at our behavior might come to the same conclusion about us and although I do find great force in Nick Humphreys argument that we are a species that needs to do natural psychology and therefore that's probably why we've got it I'm only really convinced that we have consciousness because I know I've got it and the argument for you having it as an argument by analogy I find a little bit lame the suggestion that it's possible to just look at the behavior of say chimpanzees and say well yes obviously they must have consciousness and dogs not I think it's much more difficult to decide which species might need to be natural psychologists and which species might not need to be natural psychologists and as far as actual conduct is concerned I'm all for giving them the benefit of the doubt I hope for his sake that ease is right as a contemporary of Descartes claimed that the Philosopher's had to be correct because if he'd been wrong and animals really did have conscious experiences they'd have been so indignant about his theories that they would have risen up and torn him to pieces so that point of view the theory had better be right or the author of it's in trouble it clearly oughtn't to matter to our moral feelings about animals they whether or not they're conscious we don't have a there but if we believe that they're unconscious it doesn't give us a license to treat them in any different manner from the way that we treat them now I think the fundamental point there is that because we have this very strong tendency as human beings to attribute emotions and feelings to animals it matters terribly much how we treat them because of the way other people will feel about that it might be a delusion that they have feelings but it's not a delusion that many people have strong feelings about animals and that clearly ought to be respected could you ever build a machine that was conscious I know that I'm conscious I know that I'm a machine therefore it seems to me and I know that there's nothing special I mean I perhaps I could say I have faith but I think I almost know that there is nothing in my brain that couldn't in principle be simulated in a computer so if you took the extreme policy of building a computer that was an exact simulation of a human brain doing everything that a human brain does a point for point mapping from human brain Anatomy to computer hardware then of course such a machine would have to be conscious and be conscious in just the same sense as I know that I'm conscious that's a different matter from saying it'll ever be done it could be formatively difficult to so certainly would be form to be difficult to do that precise reconstruction of a sort of computer version of a human brain would it ever happen that computers in actual commercial use get sufficiently complicated that consciousness kind of emerges I don't know I mean Nick Humphrey presumably would say no unless it became commercially important for computers to second-guess what humans or other computers were thinking if it did then I presume his line would be that's the moment when they would need to become conscious other people might feel that mere complexity itself if you've got the complexity of a computer on any system to a sufficiently high degree then consciousness will gradually start to emerge I've as I've said before I I'm inclined to agree with Nick Humphrey about his theory of consciousness and so I suppose my feeling is that computers will be conscious either if people take the step of trying to precisely mimic a human brain with a computer or if it becomes economically commercially important to make computers capable of predicting the behavior of humans or of other computers in highly complex social ways

Channel: Christopher Sykes

Views: 123,088

Rating: 4.7657213 out of 5

Keywords: Consciousness, psychology, Nicholas Humphrey, Cambridge, Descartes, animals, mind, thought, inner eye, channel 4, sykes, artifax, andrew snell, automata, robot, brando, Brain, Dawkins, Don Cupitt, Michael Morgan, Darwin, Evolutionary Biology (Field Of Study), Evolution, My Dinner With Andre (Film), Repin

Id: v294rd5phzw

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/zbend]

The hypothesis seems to be that consciousness evolved to model the conscious minds of others, but isn't that an echo chamber, you'd need conscious minds for conscious minds to evolve?

[u/Star_U_Poo]

From what I remember this influenced the manga/anime Ghost in the Shell which is another philosophical work regarding human conciseness. Ghost in the shell also went on to inspire the Matrix and other cyberpunk works. It's interesting how a single idea can branch out through other people who find that idea intriguing.

[u/keen36]

Nice documentary, it's thought provoking. I loved seeing the young Richard Dawkins

[u/CombTheDessert]

no one will care, but I just want to express what happened to me.

I'm having a drudgery of a day. I've been working on something like this consciousness thing for 15 years, in a book form. And then I click the 'you are loved' link and it's a link to a song that is relevant to what I'm working on. Ugh... what can I say ...just feels like a wink

Edit: it's so strange about the world. How negative people can be, mention faith and people call you crazy. I guess that's just the nature of things and that makes sense. Some responses I appreciate, but responses from people who say that anyone trying to do something good is crazy - they've got their own issues.

[u/robsnell]

Jump to 17:23 if you're a PRINCESS BRIDE fan: https://youtu.be/v294rd5phzw?t=1041

[u/textures1002]

It will be nice when consciousness is recognized as foundational and not some skill that evolved to promote material advantage among other bits of animated material.

[u/monkeyfullofbarrels]

What I don't get about the film maker's argument that, only humans and a select few other species have consciousness, because only those select circumstance have dictated that it's necessary, is that the hypothesis ignores a fairly established idea that evolution follows a branching pattern of ever increasing complexity.

If our consciousness is the pinnacle of the evolution of that trait, then everything leading up to that must be a lesser developed portion or previous version of the same.

Of course, that complicates things because it relies on proving that an evolutionary pattern of increasing complexity is present in every aspect of life.

[u/Venom_DNA]

I can visit higher planes of consciousness by putting myself in a trance.

That makes me a wizard, and I mock your puny "science".

laughing hysterically while levitating out of the window

[u/fffmatura]

give her