The Emergence of Human Consciousness Where is it from

The word consciousness comes from the Latin term “conscĭentĭa” that means “knowledge shared with others.”

While you are reading this, your brain’s physiology is processing information about your surroundings. This is accompanied by a sense of self, the sensation of being alive. You are conscious—and that is about all anyone can say with certainty about the most perplexing phenomenon of the mind.

Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

Almost everything we know about consciousness, as well as every philosophical and scientific conundrum it poses, is obscure. The surrounding questions are fraught with contention, debate, and discord: How are we conscious? What are its antecedents? What is consciousness precisely?

Regrettably, no commonly acknowledged answer exists to this question. Although the simplest definitions indicate that awareness is essentially anything and everything that you experience, this is far from a satisfactory response.

The ambiguity around the meaning of consciousness is symptomatic of how little we comprehend it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines it, among countless other alternative definitions, as “states one is aware of,” however this allows lots of space for disagreement regarding humans’ and other species’ various levels of awareness.