Consciousness

Unconscious intelligence

During the first few billions of years of life on this planet, its games evolved and splintered. New families of players entered the fray, with extinction pruning away all but the most skilled of lineages. Complex cells evolved, then multicellular organisms. Order was built in new ways. Plants grew. Animals devoured them.

But life’s intelligence was blind. It didn’t have to be aware of what it was doing to transform our planet. Life was intelligent, but this was an automatic channel of intelligence. It just happened.

Symphonies of action resounded, unheard.

When the first creatures with nervous systems evolved, their neurones were able to coordinate the animals’ behaviour without the animals being conscious. The order-building behaviour was still part of the automatic channel of intelligence. It just happened.

Sentience

At some point, however, a new phenomenon appeared.

Creatures appeared with minds that made decisions at the level of the animal as a whole. Individuals that couldn’t forage and hide at the same time, or simultaneously forage and mate. There were choices to be made, and the best choices happened when information from many perceptual areas of the creature’s brains became bound together with information from their memories and information about their needs. How urgent was their need for food, for instance? Or water? And what could they see in front of them that might be useful?

Somehow, in the binding of all this information into a whole coherent enough to guide complex behaviour, the creatures gained a felt sense of what was going on. And as they began to experience their lives from within, a new form of intelligence was born — a channel of awareness.

Model realities

Consciousness provides creatures with lived-in replicas of their environments. It renders colours, shapes and sounds. It positions objects in space. It presents pictures that have enough in common with reality for a creature to relate to their subjective modelling as if it was reality itself.

Good-fit pictures help a creature make intelligent choices of what to do next. They help creatures steer themselves through the complexities of their environments.

The automatic channel keeps working away, with the channel of awareness sitting above it. It takes care of everything that’s not part of the top-level decision-making. There’s the production of enzymes, the beating of the heart, and the feeding of the creature’s awareness with everything it needs to render its environment into consciousness. It provides a vast stream of information for the attention to draw from and turn into lived experience.

The sense of what the world is like that consciousness gives a creature helps it act more intelligently than it otherwise could.