Consciousness is a Biological Faculty

Consciousness isn't just an action—it's a living action.^[1] This means it's inherently goal-directed, aimed at promoting an organism's survival. Just like the heartbeat, consciousness is a biological activity that evolved to help organisms survive. However, few philosophers historically viewed consciousness in this light.

In many religious traditions, especially Judeo-Christian thought, there's a false divide between "things of the spirit" and "things of the flesh." Consciousness is seen as a miraculous, supernatural implant in humans , creating a conflict with our, "all too human," physical bodies. Plato was attracted to this view, describing the body as "the tomb of the soul." In contrast, Aristotle recognized that the body is a living body with consciousness as "an expression of its bodily powers" i.e. human consciousness is an activity of a person. For Aristotle, the living body is not the tomb of anything; it is the enabler of consciousness. And when a person dies, what had been his body becomes a corpse.

Where does the soul go when you die? To the same place as your heartbeat. Conscious activities, whether sensory or conceptual, have, like the heartbeat, a biological function. Man has eyes for the same reason he has a heart: to sustain his life; vision is an adaptive, biological, life-sustaining capacity. The same is true for the other sense modalities: each provides a man with life-sustaining information about the world.

And the same is true of the faculty of reason. The mind, the reasoning intellect, is a vital organ. A biologist could not understand the heart if he did not know its biological function, and a philosopher cannot understand reason, or any other faculty of consciousness, if he ignores the biological function of that faculty. ^[2]

The heart's function is to circulate blood, but what about consciousness? How does it help animals survive?

Animals, unlike plants, possess faculties of locomotion and consciousness. They perceive the world and move through it to get nourishment, which is crucial for survival. Plants synthesize their own nutrients, but animals must find their nourishment. Consciousness enables animals to locate food and avoid being eaten.

To put it simply: animals eat. If they eat plants, the food supply within reach is soon exhausted, so they must move around: they graze. If they eat other animals, they need to catch their prey, which again means they must move around: they hunt. Whether they graze or hunt, animals need to find their food. Consciousness is their means of doing so.

Consciousness does several things, each of which contributes to the organism’s survival.

1. Consciousness enables the animal to integrate all the various parts of its body to pursue its overall goal in relation to the perceived environment as a whole. When the lion undertakes the chase, all its muscular activity is coordinated to that single effort. And the lion chases its prey through a terrain, not as a simple stimulus-response mechanism. A plant’s parts react “locally” — the leaf may curl to preserve heat on a cold day, but a plant cannot pull up roots and move to a warmer locale.

2. Consciousness enables the animal to bridge space, in the sense that the animal can respond to distant objects. The lion sees and smells its distant prey, crouches down, and begins to stalk.

3. Consciousness enables the animal to bridge time, by responding now and over a span of time to a goal that it will not reach and utilize until later. The lion beginning its stalk crouches down now in order to capture its prey some minutes later.

4. Consciousness enables the animal to guide its actions according to the continuing changes in its goal and the requirements of reaching it. The lion uses an integrated perceptual awareness, involving sight, smell, and hearing, to adjust to the changing position of its prey in the perceived terrain.

5. Consciousness enables the animal to expand the range of its action: the organism as a whole is sensitive to minute changes in its environment. The lion’s prey (switching here to its point of view) sees the rustle of a few stalks of grass, catches the lion’s scent, feels fear, and bolts away. Perceptual awareness enables the animal to respond not just to separate stimuli but to the whole situation in the whole environment.

6. Consciousness enables the animal to learn — i.e., to acquire new knowledge. The ability to learn greatly reduces the time required for the adaptation of the organism to its environment. Instead of this adaptation requiring natural selection over hundreds or thousands of generations, an animal can learn in seconds what is the survival-significance of a novel stimulus and can adjust its behavior accordingly. The adjustment is also swiftly reversible: what formerly meant danger but now is safe can be treated accordingly. ^[3]

Consciousness on the simple animal level involves cognition, evaluation, and initiating action. These functions occur together as part of a whole. Philosopher Hans Jonas explains that motility, perception, and emotion distinguish animals from plants. Perception shows objects as distant, desire shows goals as future, and motility bridges these distances.

Three characteristics distinguish animal from plant life: motility, perception, emotion. . . .

Fulfillment not yet at hand is the essential condition of desire, and deferred fulfillment is what desire in turn makes possible. Thus desire represents the time-aspect of the same situation of which perception represents the space-aspect. Distance in both respects is disclosed and bridged: perception presents the object “not here but over there”; desire presents the goal “not yet but to come”; motility guided by perception and driven by desire turns there into here and not yet into now. ^[4]

Human consciousness, particularly reasoning, evolved for survival. Each enhancement in brain power gave our ancestors a survival edge. Human thought, whether building a hut or measuring light speed, is fundamentally a tool for survival.

Yes, man can misuse his mind — he can sever the connection of his mind to reality and drift among imaginary “constructs” of his own devising; but he can misuse any part of his body, too. The mind, like the body, is an instrument of survival, despite the fact that man does not automatically treat it as such.

The failure to adopt this biological perspective has crippled philosophy, preventing man from properly understanding his most vital organ: his mind.^[5]Philosophers have spun out theories that treat the mind as a self-contained phenomenon, ignoring its roots in and dependence on perception, emotion, and action in the world. [...] ^[6]

The question of whether computers can think exemplifies the "non-biological perspective." For a computer to think, it would need to understand ideas, perceive the world, and feel emotions. Before it could do any of that, it would need to be alive i.e. be engaged in action to sustain itself. There won't be a "thinking computer" until one is built that is alive—and then it wouldn’t be a computer but a living organism, a man-made one. The philosophy known as “Pragmatism” is merely the other side of the same false alternative: cognition vs. action.