Self-Awareness Might Not Have Evolved to Benefit the Self After All

> Rather than helping individuals survive, it evolved to help us broadcast our experienced ideas and feelings into the wider world. And this might benefit the survival and wellbeing of the wider species.

Not another "survival of the species" confusion. Social cohesion helps the survival of the individual genes. If anything, our society is actually rather precarious for species-level survival due to its self-destructive nature. Genes are not selected based on species-level survival.

I think there's some kind of rhetorical confusion in taking the fact that we have trouble explaining consciousness to ourselves on a philosophical/metaphysical level, as a sign that it also requires a very special explanation on the biological side. As far as evolution is concerned we can just take things at face value: I am conscious of seeing a tree because I'm looking at it and the image gets processed by my brain, and then I think about it etc... Obviously being aware of things is useful for an organism, and any philosophical problems beyond that are irrelevant to evolution.

Sure, this may result in the conclusion that consciousness is just an evolutionary by-product of other, useful things, but when a by-product is posed as a biological problem it's usually from the angle of wasting resources. If consciousness is just a logical result of plain awareness of sensory stimul and thought there are no further resources wasted on it beyond those needed for awareness and thought. The philosophical problem of how to understand consciousness is orthogonal.

The idea that subjective consciousness has to casual power in decision-making seems eminently silly to me. Sure, it's fairly obvious it's not the only or even always primary thing involved in how people decide what to do, but it seems absurd to me to say that, for example, someone's inner train of thought comparing and contrasting two choices at length has nothing to do with which choice they actually make.

The smartass answer is that evolution can't do things for reasons, it is just a matter of side-effects and one central tautology: that which grows and survives you wind up with more of.

Self-awareness is a spectrum instead of a binary anyway.

I've always felt it was pretty self-evident that the purpose of sapience in mammals is social first. In order to understand social standing and dynamics, a theory of mind is necessary. And, this theory of mind primarily benefits social situations, such as raising children and living in packs / herds / tribes / etc. I also believe this is why you sort of "observe" yourself; your observation of yourself almost happens in the 3rd person, and even when alone you think of yourself as observable.

The disconnect seems to be that there is a social mechanism to both recognize self awareness and then select for it, the way there might be for other socially shared features, like beauty, for example.

Likewise if you consider the outcome differences between two people who differ in attractiveness versus differing in self awareness, then those with more of the latter trait seem more likely to succeed, even if they're completely isolated from society.

It could be that it won out as an adaptation from an evolutionary perspective because it has more than one category of benefit but to say that it evolved strictly for the social benefit does not seem serious.

I have the feeling that self-awareness is inherent in every system.

When a flower gets more sunlight from one side than from the other, it starts to turn to that side. Is that different from a person who walks somewhere because they like to? Most people I ask say "Well, the human can say 'I'". But a computer can also say "I". Where is the threshold to call it "self-awareness"?

> But we have argued that consciousness may have evolved to facilitate key social adaptive functions. Rather than helping individuals survive, it evolved to help us broadcast our experienced ideas and feelings into the wider world.

Or it was a side-effect of creating empathy (mirror neurons,) which is useful to not short-sightedly do eye-for-an-eye, thereby killing off your social context every Thursday. Perhaps this allowed us to become more aggressively competitive/greedy, while still preserving family social cohesion.

If you (1) can feel empathy but (2) it still feels a little bit different from your own emotions, it doesn't seem far-fetched that it would lead to self awareness. The (2) could happen simply because the eyes' bandwidth is much higher than story telling is, making your own experiences feel more nuanced.

The reasoning in this article feels very human-centric. Most animals are likely conscious and self-aware to some extent. Yet, lots of species are loners, not what we would consider social. How would you explain their self-awareness?

I also don't agree with trying to find a single reason for self-awareness. Lots of evolutionary adaptations are beneficial in more than one way. Our bloodstream delivers nutrients to cells. Our bloodstream is also distributes immune cells throughout our body. Our bloodstream also clots when we have a cut and carries cells to help repair damaged tissue. Why can't self-awareness be beneficial in multiple ways as well? Why can't it have multiple reasons for evolving?

Hmm this seems very confused, and it's arguable whether more consciousness / self awareness has any net benefit for social cohesion.

It's very useful from an evolutionary standpoint to have an accurate internal model 'me', which you can project into hypothetical scenarios and learn from them, reducing risk and the amount of trial and error (and so increasing survival). I like the Hofstadter view that consciousness arises from the 'strange loopiness' of this self-awareness of the 'I' model.

Any social benefits are secondary, rather than the driving force, and are a result of this model and differentiating 'me' from 'you'.

What a confusing article.

I think its trying to say that self-awareness developed for the purpose of social cohesion, to help communicate emotions with the group.

Fair enough, but i thought that had already been a popular theory for a very long time. Am i incorrect about that or do i just misunderstand what is new about their theory?

Many years ago, a professor said to us something like "I am uncertain that we can use the system to explain the system."

(Meaning that we may not be smart enough to be able to explain why and how we are smart enough to explain our cognition, if we can explain it at all)

Article source: https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/a-social-evolutionary-...

Darwinism was revolutionary for its time but we are kind of moving beyond it already.

How do you make a system that can model its own state based on sensory input without giving it subjective self awareness?

Sounds very Peter Watts-esque.

Mhh, if I have evolved to a point where my experienced feelings and ideas are of such complexity that animal cues no longer suffice to broadcast them to the group self-awareness might have involved in tandem with the more complex nogging and not as a downstream feature.