The famous quote,

“I think,
Therefore I am,”

by René Descartes, is a concise way of saying that if I have enough self-awareness to ask the question “do I exist?” then the answer is a resounding “yes!” since “I” asked the question.

Animal brains use an internal representation model of a self and of the world to help it survive. Consciousness is your awareness that you exist and that the world exists. The most basic level of consciousness is the awareness that your body is separate from the rest of the world. There are additional levels of awareness of this physical separation, sometimes called the bodily self. It includes the awareness of your location in space, awareness that you can control your body and its parts, the awareness that you see the world from only one perspective in space. We will see that the internal model of the world includes a cognitive map for navigation. The model of the world includes the theory of mind (ToM) , which allows us to see other animals and humans as thinking creatures with their own minds. Thus, we predict that they will act differently than inanimate objects. This awareness about other animals having minds reflects back to us in that we become aware that we are also seen as having minds.

Consciousness has evolved over many years in a way that is similar to the evolution of intelligence. Intelligence and consciousness are different but related aspects of the mind. Intelligence is more about how well you interact with the world by learning strategies to solve problems. For some reason, there is less mystery around the idea of intelligence than consciousness, so let’s begin by discussing how we think intelligence came about. The intelligence of animals, including ourselves, has evolved over time so as to improve our ability to navigate the world in order to avoid predators while finding food and mates. A great book that explains this evolution of intelligence is “A Brief History of Intelligence” by Max Bennett. Bennett breaks the evolution of intelligence into 5 stages: steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing and speaking.

Biological intelligence evolution versus machine intelligence evolution. Image by The Quantastic Journal based on author’s information and concept from “A Brief History of Intelligence” by Max Bennett.

Steering evolved about 550 million years ago to help animals decide whether they should continue forward or turn back, based on the potential reward or punishment. Reinforcement Learning followed to help the animal make its next move so as to maximize its chances of getting a reward in the future based on its past experience. Simulation is the ability of an animal to imagine future actions and their likely consequences, before actually taking what it thinks will be its best action. The “best action” is usually the one that is believed to be the most likely to bring the largest reward in the future. Mentalizing involves the ability to imagine that yourself and others have minds and personalities. This is the ToM ability to model the psychology of yourself and others within your simulations. It improves the odds of success through collaboration and competition with other animals. The final phase of the evolution of intelligence, Bennett calls speaking or in other words the use of language which allows knowledge to be spread quickly from one mind to another without the need for the individual to make the investment in trial and error reinforcement learning that may have been required originally.

Throughout the evolution of intelligence, animals are assumed to have some agency in that they choose which actions to take at any time based on their current inputs from the world and their own history. This agency can be thought of as a model of a “self” that has evolved over millions of years to become more self-aware in different ways over time. The current state of self-awareness in humans (and maybe other animals) is what we call self-consciousness. Let’s review how this ability to be self-aware has evolved in animals, and how it could also evolve in artificial intelligence (AI).

The evolution of AI has had many parallels to the evolution of animal intelligence, and as AI evolves, a consciousness could emerge for AI agents in much the same way it did for humans.

Your place or mine

In 1971, O’Keefe and Dostrovsky discovered place cells in the hippocampus of rats. Place cells increase their firing rate when the animal is in a particular place in its environment, say for example at a fork in a maze. One place cell will fire when a mouse is at a specific fork, and another place cell will fire at some other location in the maze. The collection of place cells for all the locations in a given environment form a cognitive map of the environment.

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