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The Anthropic Principle for the Evolutionary Biology of Consciousness: Beyond Anthropocentrism and Anthropomorphism

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Abstract

The evolutionary origin(s) of consciousness has been a growing area of study in recent years. Nevertheless, there is intense debate on whether the existence of phenomenal consciousness without the cerebral cortex is possible. The corticocentrists have an empirical advantage because we are quasi-confident that we humans are conscious and have the well-developed cortex as the site of our consciousness. However, their prejudice can be an anthropic bias similar to the anthropocentric prejudice in pre-Darwinian natural history. In this paper, I propose three basic principles to provide a conceptual basis for evolutionary studies of consciousness: the non-solipsistic principle, the evolution principle, and the anthropic principle. These principles collectively help us to avoid solipsism, anthropocentrism, and anthropomorphism to some degree, although we cannot be completely free from them. Also, the landscape metaphor associated with the anthropic principle provides an image of how different forms of consciousness can be acquired.

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Notes

  1. Some authors argue that unicellular entities have some sort of primordial conscious experience, so consciousness may not require the brain (Edwards 2006, Fitch 2008, Reber 2019). The evolutionary principle is also required from that perspective, to address the question how consciousness has emerged and developed during the evolution of living entities. Nevertheless, it is notable that Godfrey-Smith (2020, p. 278) rejects such biopsychism. He distinguishes cognition and sentience, granting only minimal cognition in bacteria. To address these problems, it would be helpful to analyze cognition and consciousness by characterizing these concepts in terms of semiosis.

  2. Even if corticocentrism is accepted, it is possible that all vertebrates are conscious: the lamprey, which belongs to the basalmost lineage of vertebrates (i.e., cyclostomes), has been shown to have the layered lateral pallium (the counterpart of the cortex) containing subregionalized sensory representation and integrative microcircuits (Ocaña et al. 2015; Suryanarayana et al. 2017, 2020).

  3. For me, emergentism thus seems more reasonable because it needs to answer only this type of problem and does not require either new fundamental features or any drastic reconstruction of contemporary scientific theories.

  4. Here the term “analogy” is not used in the evolutionary sense (i.e., the sameness in function), but in general sense (i.e., similarity).

  5. This also implies that we need a framework of homology that does not depend on basal mechanisms (see Suzuki and Tanaka 2017).

  6. My point here is that it would be erroneous to attribute consciousness to the homology of a single or a few neural substrate(s). As an evolutionary entity, consciousness could be heterogeneous and decomposable into different subsystems, specific components of which are important in different biological contexts. Furthermore, in the case of convergently evolved consciousness (of mammals and octopuses, for example), some homologous components might be shared (deep homology). From this point of view, homology thinking itself (Ereshefsky 2012; Suzuki 2021; Wagner 2016) is useful to understand the evolution and biodiversity of consciousness (Ota et al. in press), or more generally, of psychological phenomena. For example, see Balari and Lorenzo (2015a) for an analysis of pain and Balari and Lorenzo (2013, 2015b) for a discussion of evolution of language.

  7. Of course, one can also speculate that there is only a single peak (for the human/mammalian/cortical consciousness). There is no a priori justification for both speculations. Then what we can do is to prepare a framework compatible with both of them.

  8. This does not necessarily mean that arthropods and cephalopods in fact have the capacity of representing oneself as having evolved consciousness, which requires higher cognitive ability—metaconsciousness. The point here is just that these animals have their own subjective world. To paraphrase the anthropic consciousness in the evolution of consciousness, “arthropodic/cephalopodic” principle is that consciousness of arthropods/cephalopods (and hence the biological characters in their evolutionary lineage on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers (i.e., conscious arthropods/cephalopods) within it at some stage. In this context, Uexküll’s umwelt theory seems to be useful to understand invertebrate consciousness, although the notion of umwelt covers more than just consciousness (i.e., organisms without consciousness also have their own umwelts). See also the following discussion in the text.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Drs. Sten Grillner, Koji Ota, Shreyas M. Suryanarayana, Senji Tanaka for valuable comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) under Grant 20K00275 and 20K15855.

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  1. Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Daichi G. Suzuki

  2. Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN), Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

    Daichi G. Suzuki

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Suzuki, D.G. The Anthropic Principle for the Evolutionary Biology of Consciousness: Beyond Anthropocentrism and Anthropomorphism. Biosemiotics 15, 171–186 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-022-09474-y

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