The rose and the fly. A conjecture on the origin of consciousness

Abstract

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid and more recently the evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argued for a basic distinction between sensation (what is happening to me) and perception (what is happening out there) with the former, but not the latter, being associated with consciousness. Conscious experiences in this view would emerge from changes in the state of the body, i.e. as bodily actions, and would maintain such a primal characteristic nowadays. I argue that the evolutionary reason for the sensation/perception distinction can be traced back to organisms’ movement, and to the consequent need to tell apart two varieties of an otherwise identical local stimulation: namely, either as the outcome of external stimuli passively impinging on body surface or as the outcome of an organism movement giving rise to encountering with external stimuli. The Erich von Holst Reafferenzprinzip effectively modelled such a distinction by postulating that an efference copy is generated in association with the motor command thus nullifying any sensory signal that arises as a by-product of an organism movement. I argue that if sensation originally equates to a bodily action (or its internalized representation), then it could be that an efference copy of local (or internalized) bodily action is generated under stimulation and compared to that associated with active motor command. This way the result would be leaving sensation (what is happening to me) or nullifying it and leaving only perception (what is happening out there) depending on whether or not a motor command has occurred. Implications of this hypothesis for the presence of consciousness in animals or other organisms such as plants are briefly discussed.