Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present the social origins of consciousness hypothesis, according to which the ability to coordinate with group members was the original adaptive function of consciousness. We offer three arguments. The phylogenetic argument presumes that consciousness is widespread among existing animals, and that widespread capacities are probably evolutionarily old. Early animals relied on consciousness to solve a problem that arose during the Cambrian, when animals first became behaviourally flexible-how to predict others' behaviour and stay together as a group. The argument from neuroscience points to evidence that even very simple brains have the capacities for social rewards and pains, and that modern brains retain close connections between the substrates for social cognition and affect. The deep adaptive alignment between social pain and harm to animals develops an argument originally proposed by William James (1890). We provide evidence that in preference tests, bodily pain is preferred to social pain in a wide range of species. We offer two approaches to testing the hypothesis-the salience of social stimuli test and the overattribution of agency test. Working under the social origins of consciousness hypothesis could lead to significant breakthroughs in research, especially by focusing on simpler systems than are currently studied.This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary functions of consciousness'.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".