Chapter 1 - Beyond Cognition — On Consciousness Transitions

Abstract

It is reasonable to believe that conscious cognition, in principle, differs from unconscious cognition, that the emergence of conscious cognition was a major transition in the evolution of life. It is believed that the degree of consciousness is associated with the degree of complexity, and conscious cognition would require a rather complex nervous system, that could not be found in any primitive animal. It is assumed that there has been an evolution of consciousness in smaller or larger steps, but in parallel and in interaction with the evolution of the nervous system. At present, it cannot be known that at what stage in evolution, with what organism, the first signs of conscious cognitive processes appeared, but it can be argued that mammals, and possibly birds, possess this quality. These animals are believed to have Gestalt perception of objects and are able to think in abstract symbols, to a lesser or higher degree, for example, a chimpanzee can do this to a much higher degree than a mouse. Chimpanzees can be assumed to have subjective experiences, although not necessarily be aware of themselves as individuals. An evolutionary perspective to consciousness leads to the view that adaptation and (phylogenetic and ontogenetic) learning is a widespread and old property of living organisms. It was an integral and essential part of early life forms that appeared about 3.8 billion years ago. It can be suggested that knowledge processing mediated by a centralized nervous system, that is, cognition, shows the same principal features as non-neural adaptive processes.