From Matter to Primitive Consciousness: The Emergence of Internality in Prehuman Nature

Author, Bruce Lerro                               

Orientation
Why socialists should care
Why should Marxist materialists give a hoot about how consciousness arose from matter? After all, aren’t there more pressing issues to consider? I want to remind these skeptics that in their early years Marx and Engels were interested in this subject. They read Hegel’s great work, the Phenomenology of Spirit with enthusiasm. I also want to remind them that Engels was not shy about insisting that dialectics needed to include events that occurred in prehuman nature. Unfortunately, many Marxists lost interest in the subject of the history of consciousness. One of the nails in the coffin was hammered in by the Western Marxist claim that there was no dialectic in nature and the dialectic began only in human history. In spite of their neglect the history of consciousness was developed by spiritualists or psychologists. After World War II four very important books came out. The first was Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin. In my opinion Gebser’s stages of consciousness from magical, mythical, mental to integral is far more inclusive than anything Hegel wrote. The second book was Jungian Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness. His description of the movement from matriarchal to patriarchal consciousness is compelling at least on a psychological, if not cultural level. The third book is Teilhard de Chardin’s great work The Phenomenon of Man in which he describes complexity consciousness emerging from primitive matter. The last book is Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown in the Bicameral Mind. Among other challenges, Jaynes claimed that there was no consciousness in a modern sense before the Iron Age, about 1000 BCE.

For those materialists who reject these spiritual or psychological theories as superstitious idealism, let me give you some scientific theories on levels of consciousness. First, there is Stephen Mithen’s book the Prehistory of the Mind in which he traces the evolution of consciousness from the different types of homo species before arriving at what he calls “cognitive fluidity”. Merlin Donald has written two great books Origins of the Modern Mind and A Mind So Rare. His stages of consciousness – episodic, mimetic, mythic and theoretic possess a Vygotskyan flavor. Lastly, Nicholas Humphrey, an English neuropsychologist and writer whose work has focused on the evolution of consciousness and social intelligence has written a number of books on the origins of mind. One of them is the subject of this article. Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about the works of some of these theorists.

This is the first of three articles on the evolution of consciousness. The first is about the emergence of primitive consciousness out of matter based on the book History of the Mind by Nicholas Humphrey. The second article shows importance of social life and then culture to the more elaborate consciousness based on The book by John Tyler Bonner titled The Evolution of Culture in Animals. My last article comes from a great book by Merlin Donald called Mind So Rare. This book traces the evolutionary of consciousness along the Proto-Human levels beginning with Homo Habilious, Home Eretus, Neantderthals and finially to Home Sapiens. Marxian archeology and anthropologist badly needs an undated history of consciousness. These three articles are my attempt to fill this in.

Where are we going?
This article is based on one of many books neuro-psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has written about the origin of mind in nature. His book A History of the Mind begins first by brainstorming eight different examples of the way the word consciousness is used in everyday life. Secondly, he teases out the eight different meanings that underlie these examples. He casts his net far and wide from waking states to sleeping; from what it means to make art to how conscious are chimps. Next, he discusses how the use of the word consciousness has changed throughout history. In a fairly simplified way, he identifies the root of the mind-body problem as the difference between the mind and the brain. He does not accept that the mind is no more than the brain as the mechanical materialists do.

The bulk of the article tries to answer the question of how far back in nature consciousness goes. He tracks the emergence of the inner from the outer from molecules to multicellular organisms. Humphrey raises the question of where in the body consciousness is grounded. He claims it dialectically moves from a local external surface to an internal life back to local externality. This parallels Vygotsky’s three stages of learning. He claims that vision began as a surface sense for light detection. Then it proceeded from surface structure to an internal location inside the brain. The proto-mind moved from signals to other organisms to internal feedback. Humphrey closes out his history of the mind by claiming that consciousness is Janus-faced, from perception on one hand to sensation on the other. He ends the book by identifying ten necessary characteristics of consciousness.

I Identifying the Settings of Consciousness and Their Meanings

Examples of how consciousness is used in everyday life
“Consciousness” is one of those words that everyone uses, yet if you asked five people to define it, you might receive seven different answers. In everyday use, Nicholas Humphrey gives the following examples of the ways consciousness is used:

• “The patient regained consciousness”.
• “You can’t deny that chimpanzees are conscious”.
• “The astronauts lost consciousness before the space shuttle hit the sea”.
• “You can’t enjoy sex if you are not conscious”.
• “My computer has no moral rights because it isn’t conscious”.
• “There couldn’t be art without consciousness”.
• “Louis XVI remained conscious for at least 10 seconds after his head was cut off”.
• “Although I lose consciousness when I fall asleep, I am conscious when I’m dreaming”.

The different meanings of consciousness in everyday life
Let’s try to extract what the implied meanings of consciousness are from the examples above. In the first example consciousness is synonymous with being awake. In the case of the astronauts, consciousness is more encompassing than being awake. It has to do with susceptibility to experiencing pain, since that is what they would have experienced had they been awake when the space shuttle hit the water. In the fourth case, consciousness seems to go not just with sensations, but with focused sensations. Sensations is also a key to the comment about computers and morality. Humphrey argues that knowing whether a computer has moral rights has to do with whether it can experience sensations, for example pain, and whether or not it “minded” about them. In the case of poor Louis the implication is that the location of consciousness is not limited to the head.  In the last case, the state of consciousness is understood as wider than waking life, since an individual retains an identity even in dreams. When awake, images are constrained by our perceptual center. When asleep, images run wild because there is no signal from the retina which reaches the sensory or perceptual center, nothing to tell the perceptual center to revise its calculations. Hence in dreams, images rule and perception is dormant, not absent. In the case of chimps and the making of art, its appeals to consciousness are more complex.

To argue that chimps are conscious can mean many things, probably more than that:

• they are awake;
• they have sensations;
• that these sensations are located throughout the body and
• there is a knowledge of individual identity.

In the case of chimps, this consciousness also has something to do with:

• thinking;
• manipulating tools;
• being aware of one’s social surroundings and
• reading the minds of other chimps.

In the case of art, consciousness is understood as a more initiated, careful, planned and manipulated process, more so than any of the other examples. How accurate are these associations?

Let us begin with the example of art. Is consciousness synonymous with thinking, deliberating, and planning?  While you have to be conscious in order to do these things, do you have to deliberate and plan in order to be conscious? No, you can be lost in fantasy or in your senses. What about the social skills and reading the minds of others? These too are part of consciousness, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for defining it. Consciousness is art is more complex.

In the first instance above, consciousness is associated with being awake while sleeping is being non-conscious. Is this true? How do we know someone is awake? Is it because they move? No, consciousness is wider than movement. You can be asleep and still be conscious. You are in a latent state in which you can be awakened by external noises outside or by being tickled with a feather by a playful loved one. Having sensations then is more encompassing than being awake. Being asleep doesn’t dissolve consciousness, it just puts it on a low burner. Yet there is something about consciousness that shifts from external processes that is most often our focus when we are awake to internal processes, like temporarily collapsing into yourself when sleeping.  Also, you can be perfectly still, have your eyes closed and still be conscious as children do when they try to fool their parents into thinking they are asleep. While being awake is a longer lasting process that you enter and leave, having sensations is a shorter, but pervasive process.

When all eight examples at the beginning of this article are taken together the resulting associations can be grouped into two kinds of consciousness – lower order, sensation-based consciousness and higher order reflective consciousness. Evolutionary consciousness is about how sensory consciousness has come into the world, that is consciousness as raw sensation. This occurs in both pre-humans and babies.  Second order mental faculties include thoughts about feelings or thoughts about thoughts. These are signs of maturity, more or less unique to humans. Summing up:

• lower level, sensory consciousness—babies and pre-ape animals;
• they are awake,
• they have sensations,
• these sensations are located throughout the body and
• there is a knowledge of individual identity.

• higher level reflective consciousness – great apes and humans;
• thinking (interpreting what something means); doing an analysis; comparison and contrast and weighing the pros and cons,
• manipulating tools intentionally,
• being aware of one’s social surroundings and
• mind-reading of other members of one’s population.

II How The Meaning of Consciousness Has Changed Across History
Humphreys makes a very interesting point that there is a history to the use of the word consciousness which expresses the forms of social organization over the course of history. According to Humphreys, the Latin use of the word originally meant “shared knowledge with other people”. Then consciousness became more exclusionary, meaning you shared knowledge with some people and not with others. Next consciousness became associated with the individual – “I am the only one who knows something”. Furthermore, next shift, according to Humphrey’s came about in the Middle Ages. He points out:

People wanted to make a distinction between…having private knowledge that one would not want anyone else to have access to for example…knowledge of one’s own secret actions. On the other hand, having knowledge that by its very nature no one else could have access to (knowledge of one’s own innermost thoughts and feelings) …Guilty knowledge, that was only contingently private became something on a person’s “conscience”, while self-knowledge, that was more necessarily private, continued to be something of which a person was “conscious”.

The last, most modern form of consciousness means “to have knowledge of one’s own sensations, perception and cognition” that were sealed from others.

III Mind-Body Problem
Here Humphrey articulates the relationship between the body and the mind based on two obvious facts:

When for example I bite my tongue, I experience the subjective feeling of pain…This experience exists for me alone: and were I to try to tell you what it is like, I could do so only in the vaguest and most metaphorical of ways. My felt pain has an associated time (right now) and an associated place (my tongue) an intensity (mild- to severe) and an affective tone (unpleasant).

This does not seem to  count as a physical event. For a materialist:

“At the same time as I bite my tongue there are related processes occurring in my brain. These processes comprise the activity of nerve cells. In principle they could be observed by an independent scientist with access to the interior of my head…he would find the objective language of physics and chemistry entirely sufficient for his purpose…For him…it is nothing other than a physical event.”

The mind-body problem has to explain how, why and to what end the dependence of the nonphysical mind on the physical brain has come about. In other words, if sensation is the root of elementary consciousness it can be divided into two parts, subjective and physical. The subjective side is the mind and the objective side is the brain. Later on in his book Humphrey distinguishes between “sentition” which is the experience of bodily states (the mind) from “sentiments” which are events at the body surface (physical events). Sentiments include which of the senses are having the experience and what areas of the body in which they are located. For instance, visual sensation would go with the retina or the olfactory sensation would correspond to the nasal mucosa.  Below is a summary.

	Root of Elementary Consciousness
	Sensation
Subjective experience Mind	Category of comparison	Objective Physical event Brain
Bite tongue	Event	Nerve cells
Participant	Who is involved?	Observer
Difficult to describe without using metaphors	Description	Described through physics and chemistry
Right now, my tongue…	Time and place
Unpleasant	Emotion	Traced by brainwaves
Perception – aching	Thorn in my foot	Observer touching my foot to locate the thorn
Sentition	Sensing	Sentiment events at body surface which senses; in what area of the body.
Red light is exciting; blue light is calming	Visual sensation	Retina
	Olfactory sensation	Nasal mucosa

IV How Far Back into Nature Does Consciousness Go?
Four stages of consciousness in cosmic evolution
Humphrey begins on a grand scale, from the emergence of life on earth four billion years ago to the emergence of human societies. Humphreys argues that at the beginning of life on earth there were neither interiors nor exteriors, neither subjective feelings, sensations, nor the material world of red light or sharp objects. The idea is that before there could be either a physical event or a subjective feeling there has to be beings available to have the experience. Humphrey is not suggesting that there was no external world until a being was there to perceive it. He suggests that this world did not manifest in the material world, not as a physical event, but as a world-substance. In other words. volcanoes, comet debris existed as world substances and only later become a physical event when it becomes experienced by animal sensation.

In a primordial soup the first molecules of life were brought together by chance to generate new copies of themselves. As time passed, molecules were slowly selected for with greater potential of maintaining their own internal boundaries and reproducing more molecules. From this came complex living molecules such as DNA, then living cells such as amoebae or bacteria. Finally multicellular organisms emerged such as worms or fish. In linear form:

• first molecules of life with the capacity to generate new copies of themselves;
• complex living molecules (DNA);
• single cells (bacteria or amoebae) and
• multi-celled organisms (worms, fish).

Unlike a raindrop or a pebble which are also bounded, an animal is self-integrating and self-individuating. This means its boundaries were self-imposed and actively maintained such as a membrane and skin which held the organism’s internal substances in while keeping the rest of the world out. The surface of the skin formed a “frontier” where exchanges of matter, energy and information took place. Some of this matter, energy and information such as gases, liquids and solids were good for its survival, some bad, and some a mix. According to Humphrey “Light fell on the animal, objects bumped into it, pressure waves pressed against it, chemicals stuck to it.” Those beings most capable of discriminating what is good for survival while blocking or avoiding what is bad would be selected for—in other words, natural selection “selects for sensitivity”. 

Where in the body is consciousness grounded? From the local to the global to the local
The first function of sensations is mediating an effective response to stimulation occurring at a body surface, that is responding selectively at the place where the surface stimuli occurred. An example is a local retraction or swelling. Sensitivity is doing something about the stimulus at the point of stimulation. As time passes those organisms which have been successful became even more discriminatory between different kinds of stimuli, perhaps stimuli that contained qualities that were both good and bad. In addition, the range of typical responses increased. The simple response of moving towards a “good” object and moving away from a “bad” object, a life-form could stay in the same place and delay an action by processing the matter, energy or information before “deciding”.

How would “deciding” occur?

By multiplying the areas of sensitivity throughout the body so that information from one part of the skin could be relayed to other parts, causing reactions there. In other words, rather than reacting simply in the area of the body where the stimulus locally occurred, other areas of the body that were not initially stimulated get into the act. This causes delays in transmission resulting in more intelligent decisions. Different stimuli were responded to with different action patterns. The action pattern was able to represent the stimulus. Information about a particular stimulus was preserved and carried into a particular action pattern which comes to represent the stimulus. It is at this point that sensitivity is decoupled from responsivity.

At first sensitivity to the environment and actions in response to the environment was very simple. Later they become more sharply differentiated into the sensory side in which representation of the stimulus is held  and where action patterns become action plans. These sensations, representations and action patterns later become “the mind” while responsively is held in check, rather than acted out. When actions are taken, they are more varied and more complex.

“Minds” first emerged when organisms were capable of storing, recalling and reworking representations of environmental stimuli across their own bodies. So initially, what eventually became mind was spread across the body as nervous tissues which in higher organisms became centered in the ganglion or the brain. For the first time in the history of the universe some events in the world became meaningful. As Humphreys says poetically,

These events had begun at last to be ‘matters of fact’ because someone ‘minded’ about the fact they ‘mattered ‘to his bodily well-being.

Vision without eyes: vision began as a surface sense for light detection
The modalities of sensations, the senses, did not emerge in evolution all fully formed and interacting. Some developed before others. The visual sense was not always concentrated in the form of an eye. Rather it began as a surface sense of detecting light as it arrives at the skin. From this it provided important information about how the smell, taste or touch of the light was impacting the skin. In the case of cilia there are hair-like structures that stick out from the surface of a cell and serve two functions: the motor capacity to move and the sensory ability to detect local disturbances. The photoreceptors in early organisms were used to detect the general level of illumination. If the degree of light was good the organism stayed where it was. If it was bad the organism moved. The way a worm is representing light to itself is not really visual perception (a sense of the objective world) but visual sensation.

In more complex organisms when sensation spread across the body it was possible to compare local illumination falling on different parts of the body surfaces and make a “decision” based on these differences whether or not to move. If they did move, they moved purposively, not reactively. So far, the evolution of internal states has evolved from local sensations across the body to a relay system of sensations. But latter evolution shows that photoreceptors across the body have become more concentrated in more localized areas called eyespots. According to Humphrey, the reason this occurred is because it became more efficient to compare illuminations at several specific locations than to compare the illuminations over wide areas of the body. Later an even better way evolved to find the direction of the source of light, and that was to concentrate the eyespots even more:

This was to transform a single eyespot into a genuine eye with an image forming mechanism. When light from one direction falls on a flat patch of photoreceptors the patch is evenly illuminated and there is no way of telling which direction the light is coming from; but when the patch is transformed into a cup, light from one direction produces a gradient illumination; and when the cup is further transformed into a spherical cavity with a narrow aperture at the surface the arrangement becomes a kind of pinhole camera where the direction of the light is precisely correlated with the position of the image. (55)

The concentration of eye spots into a single eye meant that objects could be perceived more sharply in terms of distance and color. Because different shaped objects cast different shaped images on the retina, objects at different distances could be perceived more precisely and different colored objects cast different images. So the original function of the eye was as a pinhole mechanism for detecting the direction of illumination arriving at the body surface. The problem is that as the power of vision has grown as a source of objective information (perception), its identity as sensation has gotten lost. Poets such as Wordsworth and painters such as the impressionists have tried to address this when they intentionally blurred objects by making them lose their definition, thereby trying to create a sensation of sight rather than a perception.

From surface structures to the brain                                                                     The evolution of sensory information is not just a movement from diffused to focused senses. It also moves from a diffused the body surface along a path of incoming sensory nerves to short-circuit the sensory response to the brain. Real bodily activity becomes concentrated as a kind of brain activity, moving sensation from corporeal sentiments to cerebral sentiments.

Signals vs instructions
To have a sensation is to issue a potential instruction, but not a full instruction. It receives a confirmatory answering signal within the scope of the subjective present. The intentionality would have been established neither in consulting the past not in projecting the future. A signal transpires neither in retrospect not prospect but in the present. This means that the anticipated outcome is not separate from the actual outcome. They are simultaneous.

In order for signals to become instructions, the organism requires feedback. How does this happen?  Cerebral sentiments tickle the incoming sensory nerves so that they set up a recurrent feedback loop. The result? The outgoing signal and the return message flow into a larger, long-lasting process beyond the immediate present. For an organism to have feedback, the output from the system, what a system does in the world influences the input back into the system and changes it. Then a feedback loop emerges when the input influences the output. When a stimulus is enjoyed, feedback is used to sustain or increase the stimulation. When stimulation is disliked feedback is used to reduce or eliminate it.

In the early days of evolution feedback was minimum. This meant there was a long loop and plenty of noise. Sensory responses were genuinely bodily activities and a loop had to be completed via the outside world. The organism had to do something externally to change the input (swim away from the source, suck it in, or spit it out). The coupling between output and input was crude with very little detailed information about the form of the response that would have been transferred back to the sense organs. While the amoeba wriggling would have modified the input, the precise shape or dynamics of the wriggle would not have been preserved in the return message. There was no real possibility of the information about the sentiments going around the loop. There was no possibility of sensory activity being kept alive for an extended time by feedback

In the more complex organisms sensory responses at the body surface gradually got replaced by responses targeted on a) incoming nerves and b) sensory projection cortex. This resulted in shorter loops and a much tighter coupling of output to input. This would produce a sentiment at the sensory cortex which would be preserved in the signal returning from the cortex. The signal in this cerebral sensory loop could now reverberate for a considerable time before it died away, creating an extended present. Here is a comparison between a simple and complex organism.

Simple Organisms (amoeba)	Category of Comparison	Complex Organisms
Corporeal sentiments	Type of sentiments?	Cerebral
At body surface	Where is type of response?	Incoming nerves, sensory projection, context
Low fidelity, long loop, noise	Speed of feedback	High fidelity, short loop
Loop completed via the outside world: swim away, suck it in; spit it out	Where is the loop completed?	Feedback completed within the body
Crude	Quality of coupling of input and output	Tighter coupling
Little information Shape and dynamics of wriggling not preserved in return messages	How much detail in the form of response?	More specifically communicative sentiment preserved in the signaling returning
No possibility of sensory information kept alive for an extended time Locked into the immediate present	How long is sensory information kept alive?	Can extend and build into the present

As Humphrey writes, where once the inner conductor had a full bodily orchestra to play, now he has only the sensory cortex at his disposal. Instead of any sort of action, they have become merely patterns of nerve impulses terminating at the surface of the cortex.

V Consciousness is Janus-Faced: Sensation and Perception
Having sensations that we care about are part of having experiences that we are conscious of. Once the internal boundaries of the organism became more complex, than two types of questions need to be added:

• What is happening out there? (the world)
• What is happening to me? (inside my body)

The question “what is happening to me” is rooted in sensation. Sensations lend a here-ness, now-ness and me-ness to experience. What is happening out there became perception. Perception is rooted in a more distanced, less present sense of time and space which is independent of the individual.  Both are rooted in the individual. Like the Roman god Janus, one is facing inside, toward the body, while the other faces outward, monitoring the world. Without any physical impairments sensation and perception occur simultaneously. Perception is less experienced as an external possession. In fact, it can be mentioned without involving a particular subject or a particular body. Further, an individual can perceive and sense at the same time. They can perceive there is a lump under the skin and at the same time have the sensation of pain.

However, sensation and perception are not always linked. In some cases, sensation can exist without perception, and perception can exist without sensation. People can have sensations in their bodies which no longer exist. For instance, having imaginary limbs after a real limb has been amputated create sensations. With the loss of an eye the visual sensations live on in sparks of light, shooting stars, flames or clouds. If human beings possess an inner model of their bodies what they perceive could involve not the real body but this inner model. When something happens at this surrogate location in the brain it will seem to be the subject as if it were happening at the corresponding location on the body surface. The surrogate location of my left big toe would be the point at which the incoming sensory nerve from the toe arrives at the toe area of the tactile cortex of the brain.

Therefore, the reason we can have sensations without any stimulation at the body surface is because sensations in higher organisms no longer depend on the body surface and instead come to depend on the existence of cortical sensory projection areas of the brain. The sensory cortex that once received input from the missing body part would still be intact. An example of perception without sensation would be if you listened to someone speaking and later discovered that you understood the meaning but were unaware of any sounds arriving at your ear. This would be subliminal perception.

Even sensations aren’t always understood as being one’s private possession. When we talk about our bodies what does it mean that it is mine? Is it synonymous with the concept of ownership? Humphrey suggests that ownership has at least three characteristics:

• a person has a right to choose to use it in a way they see fit;
• a person has a right to control anyone else’s use of it and impose sanctions for other’s than those he permits and
• the person has a right to get away the rights they have to a and b.

How does this apply to a person owning their own feet? If a part of my body moves exactly when I want it to move, no sooner or no later, it is safe to assume it is a part of me. Perhaps ownership of the body seems self-evident. But if ownership of the body means control over its parts by will, then babies do not own their bodies. They have to learn what parts of their bodies are theirs and what parts of the body are not under their control. Adults also can temporarily lose control or their bodies as when a leg temporarily goes to sleep. In patients paralyzed they disown body parts and claim they belong to someone else.

Humphrey demonstrates the difference between sensation and perception in smelling a rose. When I smell a rose, the sensation provides the answer to the question “what is happening to me”. Perception answers the question “what is happening out there.” The deep inhale of a rose is a sensation. A short sniff of a rose is perception. Humphrey gives us some other comparisons which I shall paraphrase. Sensation is the experience of someone writing with a feather tickling the back of your skin when you write; perception is being aware of the way the pen and the paper interact – smoothly or roughly. Sensation is basking in the music of a symphony, while perception is being aware of the piece’s acoustics and volume. Sensation is enjoying wine, while perception is interpreting it for dryness or sweetness. Lastly, there are two ways to view a painting, one from the aesthetic pleasure of color and form while perception is more about the content of the picture.

Sensory representation involves something like making a copy of the physical stimulus as it is impacting the body surface. Perceptual representation is more involved. It means something like making up a story about what this stimulus means. This is more complex because the world is more complex than the body. Because of this, the way the brain goes about each task in different. According to Humphrey the sensory channel uses analog processing which results in a pictorial representation. The perceptual channel uses digital processing which results in a description in words (propositional). When the sensory channel malfunctions but does not break down all together. This is called “blindsight”, errors that result in distortions, not mistakes. With more riding on perception, evolution builds in an error detecting mechanism which allows us to compare a reconstructed stimulus with the original stimulus.

VI Necessary Characteristics of Consciousness                             

Summarizing what has been said so far, the following assertions can be made. To be conscious means:

1) to have sensations, affect-laden mental representations of something happening and…

2) sensations have a context.  A given context of sensations is immediate. It occurs in a particular area of my body (here) at a particular time (now) and to a particular organism, me. This is different than having perceptions which may have to be reported. For instance, when you leave a phone message for a doctor, it is not helpful to say, “It’s me, it’s right now and its hurts right here”.

All sensations are implicitly located at the spatial boundary between…

• Me and not-me (it is happening to me and not someone else). I own these sensations in a way nobody else does or could. They could not be shared or transferred to anybody else. While others can feel similar sensations, they are not identical.
• At the temporal boundary between past and future – the present (now). Sensations persist so long at the surface. If I have been outdoors and underdressed for several hours then my tactile sensation of feeling cold will last for several hours. Yet my sensation of smelling the aroma of coffee may last only a few seconds. In other words, sensations occur concurrently in different modalities for different lengths of time. Taken together they make up the sensation side of consciousness. 
• Consciousness is immediate, self-characterizing – “When I feel pain in my toe, the sensation is there without my having to do any kind of mental work to classify it as being one sensation rather than another…My impression is simply that my toe hurts. The fact that it is my toe (rather than some other bit of me) that it is acting in a painful fashion (rather than acting in a visual, or auditory fashion) and that it is hurting now (rather than at some other time) ..I certainly do not have to ‘work out by inference’ that it is ‘probably my toe rather than yours, my toe rather than my thumb, a pin rather than a smell, present at this moment rather than five minutes ago.” (139)

3) Perceptions have a context
This is opposed to the characterizing or mediating perception. In perception, when I touch coins in my hand that does not mean I immediately know their value. Within one’s own culture this may seem hard to believe, but for someone who has never traveled, placing rupees in one’s hand one does not immediately mean they know their value. The fact that countries have boundaries does not immediately imply that someone living in the country knows where the boundaries run. Although it takes only a second to decide that one of eight colors is yellow, it takes even less than that to feel a sensation of yellow. I feel sensations without any decision at all.

Perceptions are less present oriented and refer back and forward in time. Not only is it raining now but my perception will include that it has rained for the last 3 days and then project about whether it will rain three days from now. Perception is not an enduring entity with a life of its own;

• at the spatial boundary between here and there. Touching a stinging nettle with my foot is not the same as touching it with my hand. The sensation of sweetness on the tip of my tongue is different from it at the back of my tongue. On the other hand, my perceptions need to make no mention of my body or the region of my body.

4) The subject of consciousness is an embodied self. This means that they are contained within a physical membrane that marks a physical boundary between me and not me in terms of matter, energy and information. In the absence of bodily sensations there is no consciousness. This might be phrased as “I feel, therefore I am.”

5) For human beings most sensations occur in the province of the five senses.

• There are no non-sensory, amodal conscious states. Which sensory mode depends on whether the stimulus at my body surface is pressure, heat, light sound, or aroma. Yet there is not a one-to-one correlation between senses and the organs of the body. One can have the same bodily location but a different experience—sight from sound. Though we do not have taste sensation in our ears, or visual sensation in our noses a different kind of creature may have those things.
• Sensory modalities are separate. Within the sense of sight I can move from red to blue to purple. It is easy to imagine an intermediate range of experiences within the same sense to move from dancing the tango to dancing the mazurka. I can move from tickling to itching. In tasting I can go from eating figs to eating turkey. I can move from sour to sweet, but I cannot go from red to sour to itching.  

6) Perceptions rarely make reference to sensory modalities at all. You can comment to someone else that it is raining, without reporting on which senses gave you that information. You don’t say I see the rain falling on the window pane; I hear the rain on the window pane; I went outside and rain dripped on my skin.

7) Other living organisms are conscious and they too are subject to sensations, but these sensations could be of different sense modalities.    

8) Mechanical robots. If we were to claim that a nonliving organism is conscious, they would have to have sensations as well as perception. They would have to be aware of their internal world—experiencing pain and pleasure—as well as making meaning perceptually.

9) Mental activities such as dreams and mental imagery, not involving direct sensation enter consciousness only in so far as they are reminders of sensation. This means that there is no dreaming independent of sensations.

10) Conscious thoughts, ideas and beliefs enter consciousness as they are accompanied by reminders of sensation. Without this sensory component conscious thoughts and ideas would drop away.

Number nine might be difficult to agree with. It is easy to assume that when we dream and think we can be independent of our sensations. We tend to think of sensations as what we initiate having or that come from the outside which are significant, such as a dramatic change in lighting and sound. When there are no dramatic changes in the environment it is easy to imagine we are not having any sensations. Yet sensations don’t cease to exist just because there are no significant changes in our environment. They are like a radio which is always on, but where the volume is turned so low that they occur below the levels of consciousness.

Where Does Social Life Fit In?
Everything which has been said up to now may sound like the history of consciousness is no more than an increasingly complex relationship between a solitary organism and its physical environment.  But remember that very early in this article Humphrey wrote that consciousness means shared knowledge with other people. However, formation of a brain lies deep in evolution of life on earth. It is possible to have social with consciousness that goes deeper than human relationships. How deep? John Tyler Bonner in his book The Evolution of Culture in Animals argues that it goes very deep. There are brains without having social life. All social animals have brains. Once the social life of animals emerges consciousness is inseparable from it. The more complex life of mammals is inseparably connected between social life and consciousness. Bonner’s book will be the subject of my next article. We will find that both social life and culture are grounded in the higher mammals especially chimps, ravens, crows, and dolphins.