To outline the origin of consciousness, I will again use the analogy of the illuminated room. What was the first revolutionary step towards the life forms we have today? The ability to use sunlight to create energy. So, light is the vital element, it was in those distant times, and it still is today. For those early primitive microbes, sunlight represented the source of life itself. So they needed to develop a means to secure that source of light, and thus photosynthesis began. In their own way, almost all individuals, simple and complex, need sunlight to survive, and a perfectly illuminated environment proves more suited to the struggle for survival than a dark one. Those beings that live and hunt in darkness depend on other “light hunters” to survive. The analogy applies perfectly to humans. But returning to the search for light, another vital step in the evolutionary chain was the appearance of the eye. The eye is itself an extremely complex organ, without which human evolution would be inconceivable. But, like life itself, it had humble origins. It began as a simple light-sensitive cell. It evolved into the ocellus, still present in some insects, composed of grouped and isolated photoreceptor cells connected to what we can now call the optic nerve. Three important later stages are the pigment-cup eye, the lens-bearing eye, and the compound eye. The first one are found in organisms such as planarians and allow for more directional vision. Lens-bearing eyes evolved in species such as mollusks and vertebrates, where light is focused by a natural lens to form an image on the retina. And complex eyes are the eyes of vertebrates, such as those of fish, complex organs with different types of photoreceptor cells (called cones and rods) for perceiving color and movement. The evolution of the complex eye suggests that it originated from a layer of transparent cells in front of the eyes, which protected the eyeball and allowed the development of a lens. But scientists also argue that the brain also played an important role in the evolution of vision, with the visual cortex adapting to process the increasingly detailed images provided by the eyes. The fascinating story of the eye’s evolution is an example of so-called evolutionary convergence, where different animal lineages independently developed similar eyes, adapted to their specific needs. To evolve is to adapt. And in the specific and fundamental case of consciousness, as we see, it all begins with the eyes, prior to the existence of a proper brain. As the vertebrate brain slowly evolved into what we have in our heads today, the eyes also gradually evolved, eventually becoming the highly specialized organs they are today. This is where the analogy of the illuminated room, or rather, the illuminated environment, comes in. The more complex the ability to see, the more clearly the eye can see around it and the further its vision reaches, the greater the awareness of its owner and its perception of itself and its environment.
The picture above, showing how different animals “see” the world is very telling and demonstrates how the human eyes, though not being the most accurate ones, perceive the world clearly than a cat or a fish.
Consciousness, then, is the awareness of the environment around oneself, gradually increasing as the animal’s field of vision expands, or rather, as its vision improves. But in the case of more evolved animals, including, of course, humans, consciousness is not limited to observing the environment in search of food or potential threats. No, just as species of living beings gradually move from the simple perception that sunlight exists and can be used to generate energy to an active life, using the sun’s energy to hunt and form a den or an entire colony, in the case of the evolution of consciousness, we move step by step towards an optimal version, where each new evolutionary stage reaches another level, until we reach animals capable of being not only aware of their environment, but also of themselves.
Ecce homo.
Consciousness precedes the existence of the brain, but only in the sense of pure and simple perception of light. It’s obvious that brainless beings have only a rudimentary level of consciousness. Consciousness, as we understand the term, is impossible to conceive without the brain. Even though brainless animals “perceive” and react to the world, the more this organ develops, the more both—perception of light and increased intelligence—contribute to our reaching an ever-higher level of consciousness. In the case that truly concerns us here, in our case, it would be enough to remove a person’s brain for us to realize that all consciousness would disappear. If the mind is the “software” that makes the brain work, consciousness is the perception that such things exist. There’s no precise term to define it, but perhaps “process” isn’t so inadequate. Because saying that consciousness is a process whose essential purpose is to keep us alive seems like a perfectly logical thing to say.
While I outline this rudimentary theory of consciousness here, without intending to exhaust the subject, of course, nor do I have the knowledge to do so, what I seek to do is to better explain my perception that human beings experience consciousness individually. Like every solidly scientific theory, this notion is not born of wishful thinking, but from the experience of my senses and what other people say about their own experiences in the world. Consciousness, as awareness of oneself and the surrounding environment, does not seem to exist only in humans, but in humans it reaches its clearly broadest degree. Humans can literally psycho-analyze themselves. Study their own mind, their own psyche, to use a term dear to Jung, whom I will discuss later.
Why is this perception that we experience consciousness individually so solid?
It begins with my perception that the individual “repeats” the stages of its species toward self-awareness. No, this is not a mere recapitulation of the tired formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” What I mean by this is that each individual is a part of its species and also, fundamentally, an isolated being, just as its species is a part of the larger world around it and also a unique, isolated species. Each animal species that emerges on Earth is absolutely random, but it is also a grouping of beings that, once they come into existence, want nothing more than to continue existing. Sine die. And each individual of an animal species also comes into the world randomly. It doesn’t “ask” to be born nor does it “need” to be born, but it is born, and, once born, it wants to continue living. Sine die. This means that each of us humans is not a “necessary” being here, but a random being, who was “simply” born. We have no greater purpose or mission to fulfill on Earth. It cannot even be said that we have a mission to reproduce our species, as we may be born sterile.
The very same thing we perceive about the social group we belong to, whatever it may be, applies to our species and to ourselves. My thesis is anchored in Stirner’s concept of singularity, and this is an incredibly profound concept because it fits perfectly to explain so much of what I perceive in this world. Each animal group, each species, is unique, just as each human group is unique and each individual is unique. The arrival of consciousness, of the degree of consciousness possible, to a species is the arrival of this level of consciousness to each of its individuals. An individual’s level of consciousness is that possible for his species. But if a species can simply “give up” on life, surrender, or succumb to another, an individual can come to the conclusion that he does not want this end for himself, contradicting the death desire of his species, his group. It is the moment when the subject realizes that he exists independently of his species. He will continue to exist even if his entire species disappears. He may give rise to another species, another group, or he may simply succumb to the weight of singularity. The reverse may be true, and the subject may want to die when everyone around him wants to live. But even if he succumbs, he will not fail to have noticed, even for a single minute, that his species is one thing, he is another.
This complete individuation seems only possible for humans, although perhaps the most intelligent apes can grasp a sense of individuality. In any case, it is the degree of consciousness, more precisely, self-awareness, that humans attain that makes this possible. Here we enter what appears to be the crux of the problem raised by Jupiter123, albeit with his indecipherable jargon. What he seems to mean, and repeats ad nauseam, is the separation between man and animal. For man, despite being biologically “just” an animal, is also the being whose self-awareness reaches the highest level. In this process, the subject “separates” himself from his species. He ceases to be, technically, an animal, and becomes an individual. I have expressed this idea elsewhere in another way: the human being is, at the same time, man and number. Man is the individual, the unique subject separated from all others. Number is the animal, the instinct, the species.
So, I agree with Jupiter123 in a transversal way. But our arguments clash on the following point: he believes in a Platonic self, a consciousness that exists independently of matter, in the ether. I don’t find such a thing conceivable.
For, embracing again a Stirnerian perspective, for me essential to the concept of self, and of individuality, is the notion of CORPORALITY, that is, the reality of the body.
It is precisely because we have a body, and a specific body, different from all others, permanently separated from all others, that we develop a sense of individuality. We realize that we inhabit a body, a single body, and that all our sensations and desires refer to that body. We realize that the well-being of our mind depends on the well-being of our body and vice versa (mens sana in corpore sano). And we realize that the most terrifying thought is the idea of losing that body. Because we only conceive of existence through it. Humans are the animals that realize that their bodies are mortal, fallible, and can become sick or even paralyzed. Hence, it is natural that their consciousness develops alongside this body and tends to seek ways to preserve it. This reality of the body, for long dualistically associated with the notion that the human spirit, the mind, exists independently of the material body, uniting with it God knows how, is essential to understanding why our consciousness is so different from that of other animals. Our much larger brain in relation to apes obviously plays a large part in this. The duality between individuality and animality (man and number) is neither Platonic nor Cartesian because it is not aprioristic. On the contrary, for a long time, the subject is “just” an animal. He has no developed individuality, nor a “soul” waiting in the ether to join his body. The human being gradually develops his individuality, his self, and this self becomes more robust and virile the stronger the subject’s physical vigor is. The body does not play a mere role; it is essential; without it, there is nothing.
Consciousness thus appears as a process through which a subject’s mind becomes aware of itself and its environment, enabling it to make better decisions regarding its survival the more enlightened it is—that is, the wider its field of vision. It follows that, although all people have, in theory, the same intellectual capacity and the same level of consciousness, not everyone “sees” the same thing, or can perceive all aspects of a problem. Let me use an example. Let’s look at the famous mural, Guernica.
Reactions to this striking work of art vary according to one’s awareness. Animals would be completely indifferent to it. The greater the perception, the brighter the room the person is in, mentally, the more details they can perceive in the painting. Thus, we would have the following reactions:
a) What the hell is this?
b) I just see a bunch of disconnected images. Is this guy learning to paint?
c) I don’t like this style of painting; I don’t see the point;
d) The painter seems to be trying to say something I don’t understand;
e) The artist is making an abstract manifesto whose purpose is not clear to me;
f) I’ve seen other works by this artist, he’s a cubist if I’m not mistaken, I find the images strange, but it seems like he’s making a kind of protest, right?
g) The artist, Pablo Picasso, the greatest painter of the 20th century, painted this work, enormous in every sense, as a way of both portraying the terror represented by the Spanish Civil War, which he had real experience of, and of making a protest against militarism and the widespread killing of wars. The work is in fact a big mural, depicting the horror and chaos of the bombing of Guernica, a Basque town in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. It’s a monochromatic, post-Cubist painting that uses symbolism to convey the suffering and devastation caused by the attack.
We would thus see that reactions to the work would range from (literal) horror at its peculiar aesthetic to a perfect and erudite understanding of what Picasso, in his artistic vision, intended to convey through it. This happens because each subject will look at the mural through his own individual eyes, and will not be able to have the same reaction as others, never perfectly the same, although he may cling to commonly accepted aesthetic judgments for convenience. This would demonstrate not only that each person interprets the world in their own way, but that each person “sees” a limited part of the world. One will be able to see in the work a collection of brushstrokes without direction or meaning. Another will look through it and realize that the artist intended to represent reality through his own unique eyes. One will attempt to criticize the style, another will judge the work to be a testament to the artist’s greatness of spirit and [unique] talent. Another, still, will be concerned with the work for purely economic reasons, analyzing its commercial value.
What happens in the animal kingdom in general, then, where some animals’ vision is limited to their restricted environment while others literally see far, is repeated in the human species, and in ours, it reaches a paroxysm, because other factors come into play besides mere individuation. One of them is selfishness [egoism]. This is present in all animals, but in humans it takes on unique dimensions. Some humans not only can see the room more illuminated than other humans, but also see the corners of the room that are still obscured. They can choose to see only what they want in the room. Or they can prevent others from seeing what they can see. They can falsify what they are seeing. All of this depends on the level of consciousness. The more developed, the greater the possibility of the individual making the most effective use of it. Which includes deceiving others egoistically.
But individuals, individual minds, which didn’t fall from heaven or come from the ether, came into being naturally, and being natural, they obey certain rules, or rather, they follow patterns common to all other animals, right? I can’t expect an individual to exist in a vacuum, can I?
Certainly not, and this is where an analysis of humankind solely from an individual perspective proves incomplete. Because there is that part of us that is common to all members of our species, and there are factors in our physical and psychological evolution that do not depend on our free will, but exist even before we can conceive of what free will is. Such factors shape much of what we might call our essentially biological, mechanical, involuntary behavior. We could call it instincts. Or the unconscious.
The first thinker to develop a decent theory of the unconscious was Sigmund Freud. The reason Freud’s technique was named psycho-analysis because it does precisely that: it analyzes the individual’s mind (psyche), attempting to form a more or less accurate picture of how much the subject’s past experiences have shaped his/her personality, to the point where the current imbalance in this personality motivates the person to seek a therapist. Freud concluded that the main factors that lead a person to act in ways they don’t understand, or even consciously reject, are beliefs and experiences rooted in their subconscious, which contrast with the person’s natural desires, creating a neurotic personality.
An essentially neurotic mind would be one where the individual will clashes with traumatic childhood memories, the species’ inherited instincts, and beliefs firmly rooted in the unconscious. For Freud, the unconscious is a “bottomless pit” where the individual internalizes all his perceptions and experiences of the world, combining them with his inherited instincts, in a process that begins long before he is aware of what he is or do. Then, as the individual grows, his consciousness, which can expand to an optimal level, comes into conflict with what his mind has long internalized. The psycho-analytic technique consists of freeing the individual not from these instincts, but from his fear of them. It consists in helping the individual learn to literally become a mature subject, that is, to understand that he is a conscious and autonomous individual who can live fruitfully by finding a balance between his deep-rooted beliefs and instincts and his individual will to live life to the best of his ability. Freud was one of humanity’s liberators, and his ideas are so consonant with Stirner’s that it’s almost as if they represent a natural complement to the latter. The deep-rooted instinct of the species—that is, the need for reproduction, the herd mentality, the “esprit de corps,” as well as the very locational situation in which the subject is born and grows—all of this has an impact on the subject’s mind, which sometimes they don’t overcome until the moment of death. Many live and die like herd animals, like “a new repetition of an eternal zero” (Kierkegaard), and are content with that. Again, and forgive me for being repetitive, the analogy of the illuminated room applies here. The more the subject realizes their absolutely unique place in existence, the more the instincts of the species recede into the background. The more illuminated the world around them—and this includes the precise perception of who they are and how much they owe to their species—the more the subject acquires a broader self-awareness. Stirner used as an example the difference between the mind of a child, an adolescent, and an adult. Adult in the true sense of the term: a subject fully aware of himself. And Freud never meant to say that the unconscious is something that will absolutely determine every moment of a person’s life. His technique consists of trying to understand as much of this unconscious as possible. And it was in this long research effort that he reached the exact same conclusion as Stirner: each individual is absolutely unique, EVEN in the way they unconsciously internalize the influence of their surrounding environment.
Even when the possibility of individuation is reduced to just that—a possibility—the individual remains “condemned” to be himself, even if his outward behavior never differs from that of others around him. But the outside world exists, and certainly the beliefs of that world exist, which force the individual to adopt a certain attitude, either to internalize or reject them. In this sense, the way each person’s personality is constructed depends on countless factors and variables. It depends on the environment in which one lives, one’s physical health, and the health of one’s brain. If one’s inherited a congenital disease from the family, his life will be different from that of a perfectly healthy individual, and his mind will internalize his experiences differently. Ultimately, it is a highly complex process, and each person reacts and develops differently. The unconscious is no different from the conscious in this sense; it simply represents a side of the human psyche that remains obscure, hidden. But it can be more or less understood or sublimated as the individual increases his level of self-awareness.
