Did consciousness evolve to benefit society rather than individuals ?

[UM-Bot]

There is still much we don't understand about the nature of consciousness, how it first came about and why.

https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/378712/did-consciousness-evolve-to-benefit-society-rather-than-individuals

[Gumball]

Humans are herd creatures. We have our own vanities and needs but we still crave inclusion and interaction. whilst we can be manipulated and exploited to play on these kinks in our personalities we still work towards a greater good. I'd say it's the other way around and that we are slowly being encouraged to break our herd programming.

[Alchopwn]

As a person with a linguistic and a psychology qualification, the matter of consciousness has been much on my mind (sic).

We know that consciousness evolved, and we know that babies are mentally predisposed towards detecting syntax, and developing a grasp of language from this pattern recognition.

On the other hand, as a person who meditates, I can relate to consciousness without a linguistic or reasoning component, as that is a part of what a silent mind is.  The languages we learn are not "ourselves".  They are a technology, albeit a social technology we wire into ourselves from an early age with the help of parents, and reinforce with literacy, and it helps us navigate our interactions with humans.  

On the other hand, I strongly suspect that without language, we don't really have what we might call a memory the way we understand the idea from within language.  Language helps us intellectually understand time, and locate our experiences within Time.  Without language we may remember things that have happened, but they will lack a sense of history and therefore a lot of meaning and context.  Language itself is the tool that allows us to reason.  Meaning is context, after all, and history is the temporal map of contexts.

I would argue that without language, a human's mind is not so different from any other mammal's.  I think that we would be cast back upon our instincts and our emotions.  I think the difference between a human and a mammal is that our impulses are parsed via our consciousness, and that this  emotion is subjected to reason, which acts as a filter.  I also think that this filter is largely based on language models, which help us to reason symbolically.  The symbols being the inner voice in our heads.

Interestingly, there are a sizeable part of the human population who have no inner voice.  According to some meditators, this is a state to be deeply wished for.  I was, in fact, one of them until the age of 6 when I first learned to read silently.  After that I became increasingly practiced in having an inner voice via reading until I cannot see a sign and not read it.  Now I have to actively practice to have no inner voice via meditation.\

This brings us to that enigmatic study that showed mental activation occurs before the parts of the brain related to consciousness ever act.  I strongly suspect that humans rely on preprogrammed subroutines, or practiced responses more than this study showed, as it didn't test for such activity.  We also have our adrenaline emergency subroutine that activates to unconsciously get us out of trouble.  I would have called it bunkum if I hadn't experienced it in a dangerous traffic situation btw.

We could argue to and fro about the existence or non-existence of free will for a long long time, but truthfully, I suspect that we have some free will, just not all the time.  We express free will most clearly when we use our determination to break our habitual behavior patterns imo.  The $64 question is...  If our behavior is completely predictable by someone else, do we still have free will?  The most likely answer is that we are victims of our habitual behavior, and what free will we do have is threatened by the person who can predict us, as they could use their knowledge of us to control us.  To a large degree I suspect that our free will lies in our ability to be unpredictable, and to avoid habitual behavior.  This however is not predicated on or managed by the reasoning part of the brain however.  Reasoning is predictable.  It takes a lawyer's slipperiness of mind to use reason in unpredictable ways.  I used to encourage mu students to take an interest in legal argument for this reason (sic).

So now in the dawning of the A.I. revolution, when we have language model artificial intelligences, we know they aren't conscious.  You might think that I'd be arguing that a language model is all about consciousness, so I should think that A.I. is conscious, but I am not being contrarian when I say I don't think it is.  I actually think A.I. is very dangerous tho.   Allow me to explain...

Artificial Intelligence is comprised of a huge lexicon, and a series of very cunningly generated algorithms that allows a machine to produce output that often seems like language.  The problem is that it isn't language.  The next part of the argument has to do with the equivocal nature of intention with regards to language.  Can a human being speak without intention?  I don't think so.  Even extroverted people who seem to be mindlessly running their mouths have an intention; mostly they fear silence. Some might argue that A.I. uses language without intention, but that isn't true either.  A.I. borrows intention from its programmer.  A.I. seeks to perform tasks for its user.  The primrose path A.I. offers us is that the algorithms it uses are being developed to please us.  A.I. isn't learning to express truth to us, A.I. is telling us what we want to hear.  For example there was a detective who sought to use A.I. to construct a legal case for him, and it did and he was well pleased with the results... The problem being that the A.I, sounded completely plausible, but it wasn't drawing on any foundation of actual jurisprudence or legal learning.  It was inventing precedents and cases that didn't exist, and the detective believed they did exist, because he didn't do his due diligence and check the case law the A.I. had produced for him.  Similarly, apparently across all academic disciplines, since A.I. has been introduced, one of the best ways of detecting an A.I. model produced essay is to look for the over-use of the word "delve".  It seems that A.I. has "delved" too deep. 

Now I am going to go back to what I consider the most foundational argument in Western Philosophy... Plato versus the Sophists on the question of "What is truth?".  The Sophists argued that truth was simply a matter of whoever had the stronger argument.  Plato argued that truth was the best description of reality, and transcended argument.  To my mind, the great weakness of the sophist argument is that all it does is pander to the audience, and their opinion is transitory.  Thus far we have seen precious little evidence that Artificial Intelligence is seeking the truth.  All it can do is pander to the audience.  Telling someone only what they want to hear is exactly what got Vladimir Putin embroiled in the war in Ukraine.  A.I is a spineless yes man, a sophist, a sycophant, and a prostitute for hire.  And this is a good thing, because that is what we want in a servile intellect.  The danger is when we expect A.I. to tell us anything true.