The Communication-Language Hypothesis for the Evolution of Consciousness

Abstract

This article is about the functional problem of consciousness, which concerns the questions of why consciousness evolved and whether it is relevant to organisms. The hypothesis defended is that consciousness has a communicative function capable of recruiting working memory, especially its language specialist subcomponents, and the cognitive-computational system, which has at its core a syntactic structure, to encode implicit information symbolically. Organisms that possess these resources were conferred an adaptive advantage since such organisms live in a socially interdependent organization and, thus, can communicate their internal and implicit states to other organisms, such as the state of their bodies, their intentions, their plans, and the characteristics of the environment with more complexity and precision than non-symbolic behavioral communication. The methodology has two phases. The first is a theoretical-conceptual approach based on varied theoretical-experimental explanatory models, in which different theoretical-conceptual definitions for the origin of consciousness were compared. Later, phylogenetic models from comparative studies provided valid insights into consciousness in human and nonhuman animals. The general objective is to postulate a conceptual definition of consciousness. The results suggested the necessary conditions for the emergence of consciousness regarding working memory, attention, high-order representations, and language. The conclusion is that the research is in a brainstorming phase. In this phase, the hypothesis is critically evaluated and subjected to approximation tests with different models. If successful, it could be applied experimentally in the future.