Theory sketch of consciousenss

Children prior to about 9 months are not conscious.

Consciousness is a biological adaptation that in ontogeny begins to emerge at 9-12 months when infants first experience shared attention to common objects and shared intentions towards common goals. Consciousness is a function that triangulates on common objects and goals, using shared attention mechanisms. It thereby 'objectifies' - it opens up a realm of shared objects and goals and norms and values in a public realm. It also 'subjectifies' by opening up the corollary realm of self-directed agency and subjectivity and selfhood. Consciousness is inherently dualistic.

Rationality of the flexible, strategic, and explicit sort, is a bridge between these two realms of objectivity (worldhood) and subjectivity (selfhood). Rationality operates by normative principles (deduction, inference, truth) with objective content (facts), relating this objective realm to the subjective realm of preferences and desires.

You can imagine what sort of adaptive value having these dual realms of ‘world’ and ‘self’ could confer on a species! This is another topic in itself.

Discursive rationality is built into the structure, content and pragmatics of language. Causality, logical form, and the dualistic ontology of agent/subject/self and object/fact/world is built into the medium of language to facilitate the coherent and intelligent relationship of the two in adaptive behaviour.

Consciousness, explicit rational thought, and language - I hypothesize - co-evolve together, but for rational thought and language to get hold, they need a pre-rational, pre-linguistic kind of shared attention based consciousness.

These co-evolving adaptations emerge as a GROUP level adaptation, not an individual level adaptation. They are all inherently social/relational; they COULD NOT be selected at an individual level. Consciousness as 'shared world' is not something that can be understood as an individual-level adaptation. The idea of group selection is very important here. Hominoid groups in the Upper Palaeolithic (40-30,000 years ago), I proposes, competed in terms of 'group consciousness'; different groups were engaged in different 'conscious worlds' - the 'more' conscious groups tended to survive and reproduce relative to the less conscious groups. (Imagine this in terms of language - but the key is to think of consciousness as a group level adaptation that enables the evolution of language).

Animals don't have these dual realms; they therefore don't have autonomy and selfhood, nor do they have objectivity, a 'world' that they are in and act on as 'selves' or agents. They live in an unconscious realm of 'affordances' - a 'soup' in which the world and self have not been separated out. They don't initiate actions deliberately, they don't act ON anything; they are in a flux of doing and sensing and feeling of an automatic, pre-conscious sort. One could perhaps imagine this pre-human realm as consisting of free-floating 'sensation' states, but we cannot imagine what this would be like, since our world is inherently intentional (involving an awareness of 'aboutness' in perception or 'directedness' in action). Other animals cannot triangulate on and fix 'objects' into 'being' with shared attention mechanisms.

Prior to the human child becoming 'self conscious' - of private thoughts and intentions and desires (as well perhaps of emotions, pains, etc) - the child is simply conscious, and this consciousness is OF external 'common' objects, and external 'common' goals or objects of intention. This kind of consciousness is inherently dualistic - separating out 'a world' from 'selves' acting on or perceiving the world - but the child is not yet aware of this dualism in a reflective, self conscious sense. The reflective sense of awareness comes at around 4. But at a phenomenological level, the experience of the 2 year old is already conscious, i.e. dualistic. There is inherent awareness of agency and selfhood, as well as public objecthood. There is inherent intentionality (in the sense of ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’). This intentionality in early infant experience is the 'consciousness' adaptation - the product of group selection.

It is also at around 9-12 months old that language ability begins to emerge, as well as - I hypothesise – the rudiments of flexible, discursive, thought-based, rationality and planning.