Consciousness-of-Itself in Music as Manifestation of Evolutionary-Memetic-Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Beyond the extra-musical connotations observed in much late eighteenth-century music, pattern recurrence sometimes appears to be associated with a strongly narrative meaning. As an example, certain late works of Beethoven possess a sense of self-'awareness' via self-referentiality. There is the potential for seeing this as the manifestation by music of a degree of independence from the composer's consciousness, one driven (in a view informed by the memetic theory of cultural evolution) by the musical patterns involved. Such music is manifesting a form of agency — a consciousness-of-itself (CoI) — 'reflecting' on its structure and its generative processes in a way that is not strongly evident in earlier musical traditions. The notion of CoI is partly based on Dennett's conception of consciousness as a form of millisecond-level evolution, with evolution, conversely, being a glacially slow form of consciousness. Tying these ideas together, my underpinning question is: how can evolutionary theory and the structural and functional alignments between music and language illuminate our understanding of consciousness? Addressing this question can help illuminate the evolutionary relationships between music and language, the cultural evolution of music, and the nature of consciousness itself.