Evolutionary Emotion

December 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Evolution, Feeling |

In the evolutionary history of humanity, consciousness is a comparatively late arrival, appearing as a faculty only in the relatively recent phase of the evolution of life. Stuart Hameroff puts this date variously at between 1 and 200 million years ago (1). This suggests that, for the majority of the time that beings have been on Earth, they have relied on non-conscious mental processes for survival.

The development of the non-conscious mind, a mind we are still most certainly in possession of, therefore preceded the emergence of those conscious mental processes which are capable of self-reflection and reporting. It is likely that much of what we do is shaped by these adaptively established mechanisms of non-conscious thought. It is also likely that the motivation for much of what we do, which we experience as ‘feelings’, derives from this pre-conscious phase in the development of (human) life.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/cambrian.html