Origin and evolution of human consciousness.

The study of the origin and evolution of consciousness presents several problems. The first problem concerns terminology. The word consciousness comes from the Latin term conscientia that means "knowledge shared with others." However, the term consciousness also refers to several other aspects involving both its levels (sleep, coma, dreams and waking state) and contents (subjective, phenomenal and objective). A second issue is the problem of other minds, namely, the possibility to establish whether others have minds very like our own. Moreover, human consciousness has been linked to three different forms of memory: procedural/implicit, semantic and episodic. All these different aspects of consciousness will be discussed in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, we discuss different neuroscientific theories on consciousness and examine how research from developmental psychology, clinical neurology (epilepsy, coma, vegetative state and minimal state of consciousness), neuropsychology (blindsight, agnosia, neglect, split-brain and ocular rivalry), and comparative neuropsychophysiology contribute to the study of consciousness. Finally, in the last part of the chapter we discuss the distinctive features of human consciousness and in particular the ability to travel mentally through time, the phenomenon of joint intentionality, theory of mind and language.

The emergence of primary anoetic consciousness in episodic memory.

Based on an interdisciplinary perspective, we discuss how primary-process, anoetic forms of consciousness emerge into higher forms of awareness such as knowledge-based episodic knowing and self-aware forms of higher-order consciousness like autonoetic awareness. Anoetic consciousness is defined as the rudimentary state of affective, homeostatic, and sensory-perceptual mental experiences. It can be considered as the autonomic flow of primary-process phenomenal experiences that reflects a fundamental form of first-person "self-experience," a vastly underestimated primary form of phenomenal consciousness. We argue that this anoetic form of evolutionarily refined consciousness constitutes a critical antecedent that is foundational for all forms of knowledge acquisition via learning and memory, giving rise to a knowledge-based, or noetic, consciousness as well as higher forms of "awareness" or "knowing consciousness" that permits "time-travel" in the brain-mind. We summarize the conceptual advantages of such a multi-tiered neuroevolutionary approach to psychological issues, namely from genetically controlled primary (affective) and secondary (learning and memory), to higher tertiary (developmentally emergent) brain-mind processes, along with suggestions about how affective experiences become more cognitive and object-oriented, allowing the developmental creation of more subtle higher mental processes such as episodic memory which allows the possibility of autonoetic consciousness, namely looking forward and backward at one's life and its possibilities within the "mind's eye."