The Transition to Minimal Consciousness through the Evolution of Associative Learning

Abstract

The minimal state of consciousness is sentience. This includes any phenomenal sensory experience – exteroceptive, such as vision and olfaction; interoceptive, such as pain and hunger; or proprioceptive, such as the sense of bodily position and movement. We propose unlimited associative learning (UAL) as the marker of the evolutionary transition to minimal consciousness (or sentience), its phylogenetically earliest sustainable manifestation and the driver of its evolution. We define and describe UAL at the behavioral and functional level and argue that the structural-anatomical implementations of this mode of learning in different taxa entail subjective feelings (sentience). We end with a discussion of the implications of our proposal for the distribution of consciousness in the animal kingdom, suggesting testable predictions, and revisiting the ongoing debate about the function of minimal consciousness in light of our approach.

The evolution of cultural gadgets

“…Going beyond these behaviors requires the evolution of additional dedicated hierarchical structures in the brain: Top layers that integrate and control the information arriving from lowers levels of the hierarchy, and back and forth interactions among layers that enable the formation of associations that involve processes of reentry among groups of neurons in addition to associations between single neurons (Edelman & Gally, ; Märtens, Meier, Hillebrand, Tewarie & Van Mieghem, ); dedicated memory structures such as the hippocampus and cerebellum in vertebrates that enable the storage of compound representations, as well as flexible, integrating, reward systems. Complex forms of cognition depend on the implementation of high‐level associative processes within this complex, evolved, cybernetic architecture (Bronfman, Ginsburg & Jablonka, ; for detailed discussion see Ginsburg & Jablonka, ).…”

Senomic view of the cell: SenomeversusGenome

“…Although these plant synapses differ in their molecular toolkit and some structural aspects from the animal neuronal synapses, they are organized through very similar principles and also perform analogous tasks [39–46]. Furthermore, neuronal synapses have deep evolutionary origins and have evolved from proto-synapses [9,47] which might underlie primordial sentience based on proto-feelings, proto-emotions, proto-qualia, and proto-consciousness [7,24]. It can be argued that such a deep evolutionary origin of neurons and synapses implies that these derivative qualities are inherent aspects of cellular organisms which are as fundamental to unicellular existence as they are known to be for multicellular organisms [8,30,43,48].…”

“…Upstream of the genome and epigenome, the bioelectric senome acts in close association with the plasma membrane. Recent advances in neurosciences make it clear that feelings, emotions, qualia and consciousness are very real biological phenomena based on chemistry and fundamental biology [2–7]. Sleep, qualia, consciousness and cognition, all appear to represent essential living qualities, not only for humans, but for all living organisms as they struggle to survive in a hostile environment [8–17].…”

“…If feelings, emotions, cognition, qualia and consciousness are based on neurochemical toolkits and processes [2,3,7,9,18–21], their true nature should be decipherable. Nevertheless, we obviously fail in this crucial aim, suggesting that our current approach is missing some essential aspects of these phenomena and/or our approaches and methodology are flawed.…”

“…Here we suggest that in order to succeed in resolving the biological basis of these fundamental aspects of living organisms, we need to add a new science to our biological agenda that focuses on sensory biology linked to cellular cognition and behavior. This new science of feelings, emotions, qualia and consciousness must be able to tackle these issues from an evolutionary perspective [4–7,16,18–22]. Its further requirement is an explanation of the emergence of a variety of elusive biological phenomena in their hypothetical ancient proto-states at the level of the simplest unicellular organisms [7,14,16,22,23], such as proto-feelings, proto-emotions, proto-qualia, proto-consciousness [7,24] which could then be further engaged as complexation in multicellular organisms.…”