The Physical Evolution of Consciousness

The evolution of human consciousness may seem like a mystery that cannot be solved, with over the years, medical science has made remarkable advancements. It is evident that just like the human body and all its organs, human consciousness also emerges from the process of biological evolution. Even though researchers are still on the preliminary stage of unravelling the entire and detailed mystery behind the evolution of consciousness, they have made a tremendous amount of progress in this field.

It didn’t take researchers to understand the factors that make a thing come to live, and gradually, the mystery of human consciousness that we struggle to understand today will also be solved. Earlier, it was believe that living things and organisms were brought to life with a mysterious essence, a type of vital force, also known as the élan vital, something that was missing in non-living things. However, modern research negates this belief by affirming the fact that both living and non-living things are only made up of atoms. The funny thing is, there is no difference between the types of atoms that are found in living and non-living things, the only difference is the proportions of these atoms.

This leads us to understand that the organisation of atoms brings a thing to life, and of all the living organisms, only humans have a powerful network of knowledge, intellect and information. It can be concluded that despite the other factors that contribute to the evolution of consciousness, it is likely to be an emergent phenomena that has taken birth from the organisation of matter.

Basically, an emergent phenomena is a term that describes how a complicated system tends to attain certain features that have striking quantitative and qualitative differences as compared to simpler properties that are not inherited, inherent, or subjected to any kind of prediction or interference. This cannot be magic, but in fact, it is a complex network of physical interactions occurring within the brain. Emergence is a self-organising and sudden process that has no external causes and it’s characterized by its complexity.

There is an abundance of research that explains how the nervous systems evolved from simple beings and rose high up in the evolutionary process to emerge as a powerful brain. This is also a great deal of research about the functioning of the nervous systems, and how they contributed to the development of thoughts, cognition, actions, perceptions, senses, emotions and behaviour.

For instance, humans and animals possess the same molecular mechanisms that emerge as the building blocks to encourage memory development and learning. The information gets physically encoded and embodied within the brain through a series of structural molecular changes within the neuron. In certain ways, the dynamic prowess and power of the human brain simply occurs because of the complicated assembling of these simpler molecular mechanisms and building blocks during the process of evolution.