Bibliographic record
Abstract
The functions of consciousness, viewed from an evolutionary standpoint, can be categorized as being either general or particular. There are two general functions, meaning those that do not depend on the particulars of how consciousness influences behavior or how and why it first evolved: of (1) expanding the behavioral repertoire of the individual through the gradual accumulation of neurocircuitry innovations incorporating consciousness that would not exist without it, and (2) reducing the time scale over which preprogrammed behaviors can be altered, from evolutionary time, across generations, to real-time. But neither answers Velmans' question, of why consciousness is adaptive in a proximate sense, and hence why it would have evolved, which depends on identifying the particular function it first performed. Memory arguably plays a role here, as a strong case can be made that consciousness first evolved to make motivational control more responsive, though memory, to the past life experiences of the individual. A control mechanism of this kind could, for example, have evolved to consciously inhibit appetitive behaviors, whether consciously instigated or not, that would otherwise expose the individual to harm. There is then the question of whether, for amniote vertebrates, a role in memory formation and access would have led directly to a wider role for consciousness in the way the brain operates, or if some other explanation is required. Velmans' question might then have two answers, the second having more to do with the advantages of global oversight for the control of behavior, as in a global workspace, or for conferring meaning on sensory experience in a way that non-conscious neural processes cannot. Meaning in this context refers specifically to the way valence is embodied in the genomic instructions for assembling the neurocircuitry responsible for phenomenal contents, so it constitutes an embodied form of species memory, and a way of thinking about the adaptive utility of consciousness that is less concerned with real-time mechanistic events than with information storage on an evolutionary time scale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".