Evolutionary Trajectories of Consciousness: From Biological Foundations to Technological Horizons.
Brain Sciences July 9, 2025 Evgenii Gusev, Alexey Sarapultsev, Maria Komelkova
Consciousness is proposed as an emergent, goal-directed informational system organized by subjective experience, which acts as an active system-forming factor throughout biological evolution. The framework traces the development of consciousness from proto-conscious invertebrates through vertebrates, where features like sensory filtering, causal reasoning, and adaptive arbitration appear, culminating in humans with culturally mediated networks. This perspective integrates evolutionary biology, information theory, and quantitative modeling to explain why consciousness arose and how subjectivity shapes complex networks, also providing a basis for exploring nonbiological extensions of subjectivity.