> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)
In AI there have been experiments where agents need to communicate and cooperate in order to solve tasks. They developed a kind of "language", as a result. It's just what happens when cooperation has an evolutionary advantage.
An agent needs to model its environment in order to plan successful strategies. But when the environment contains other agents, it becomes necessary to model them too - thus, create representations that can predict future actions of those agents. When applied on the agent itself, these models create the "ego", a representation useful in predicting the agent's own future actions. All this is necessary in order to maximise rewards in the game (and by game, I mean life, for humans, and the task at hand for artificial agents).
I think and theorize on consciousness quite often, but this angle was new to me and kinda blew my mind. Thanks for sharing :)