Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey

Author:Nicholas Humphrey [Humphrey, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

In that same lecture, I compared mind-reading to a kind of mind transplant and emphasized how, as with any other organ transplant, it's important that the receiver and donor are compatible. That's to say, if you are to understand other people by putting yourself in their place, you must be able to assume that their minds and yours run on similar principles; better still, that you each picture your minds in the same way.

For humans, this is in fact continually tested and brought back on track by the revolving dynamics of interpersonal encounters. As your life unfolds, it becomes ever more apparent to you how your understanding of yourself helps you understand other people—and, for that matter, how it helps you to be understood by others.

The mutual adjustment and refinement of mental models that flows from this will be a work in progress that continues throughout your individual life. As a human, you will have language and culture to support you. But, long before humans became human, natural selection will have seen to it that the basic structure of phenomenal experience, with which you are born, is the structure with which others of your species are born too.

I believe the importance of mind-reading in both directions may help explain features of phenomenal consciousness that would otherwise seem superfluous. Earlier, I called attention to ‘sexual selection’ and how it can produce positive feedback, leading to a runaway beautification of animal courtship displays. The more attractive the tail of a peacock to a peahen, the greater the advantage to her male offspring in having a tail that's even more attractive. Thus, the tail becomes in effect self-selecting. I raised the question of whether anything like this could have occurred with phenomenal consciousness. Perhaps we see now just how such positive feedback might have happened. The more phenomenal consciousness helps the mind donor with the task of mindreading, the more it helps the recipient with the task of being mindread. Thus, phenomenal properties could indeed have become self-selecting, leading to their spiralling up into the phenomenosphere, to the heights of strangeness and beauty we enjoy today.

Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind, has argued explicitly that consciousness has not just a social function but also a sexual one. Given that mind-reading between mates—or potential mates—is probably the arena in which the skills of a natural psychologist matter most of all, I'd say he's onto something.

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