Carsten Korth

Fundamental assumptions If we consider the late emergence of consciousness is an advanced product of Darwinian evolution, we must come to the insight that the emergence of consciousness was gradual, i. e. that there were intermediate precursors to full consciousness. The distinction of state and content consciousness helps to clarify the idea that beyond wakefulness (i. e. “state consciousness”) there is another dimension that is significantly different along an evolutionary trajectory of species. In that sense, other species might be attributed consciousness (state), but not full human “content consciousness” even though primates may display early stages thereof. Claims 1. Consciousness is a late evolutionary achievement at the end of a process that started with the extended mind and then involved co-evolution of tools making/using and the brain. 2. Tool evolution is the long term is the result of interacting human minds and requires social transmission in conjunction with externalizations. Therefore ultimately, consciousness is acquired or uploaded from other minds on both the anthropological phylogenetic and the individual, ontogenetic level. Reasoning The concept of the “extended mind” states that external objects are necessary constituents of our cognition by utilizing external operators such as objects or tools. Once the extended mind operates on tools such as modifying them through the execution of motor acts, tool evolution is triggered. Instructions for tool making and use are transmitted between individuals, promoting tool improvements for facilitating adaptation to the environment and in fact shaping the environment by generating an ever increasing “toolsphere”. All tools in the toolsphere can theoretically be assigned a precise position in a pedigree, similar to the tree of life, as evidence for Darwinian evolution at play. The progressive accumulation of tools during evolution created a joint intersubjective affordance space by eliciting similar instructions of tool making or use in human individuals. These joint intersubjective affordances synchronized, i. e. made perceptions and predictions between those individuals more similar and therefore promoted prosociality which, in turn, facilitated the transmission of tool making or using instructions, in a mutually reinforcing loop. The progressive refinement of this joint affordance space along the tool evolution trajectory ultimately established a third person perspective, and content consciousness, i. e. by establishing a virtual intersubjective communication space. At any step in the co-evolution of tools and brain, Darwinian selection either acted on the biological fixation of successfully transmitted tool-related externalizations or liberated previously fixed behaviors to allow more flexible tool-related (i. e. external) interactions. As previously introduced in the dual inheritance theory, the entanglement of tool evolution with biological evolution led to biological adaptation of the human brain to tool evolution. Conclusion and Consequence: Content consciousness cannot be conceived outside an evolutionary trajectory rooted in the entangled evolution of tools and Darwinian evolution of the brain. Through the fundamental nature of tool evolution as an external, socially transmitted act, content consciousness is therefore socially transmitted or “uploaded” on both a phylogenetic and ontogenetic level. Any search for a neural correlate of consciousness has to take this into account.

Study of human medicine in Berlin and Munich, Germany. Trained as board-certified psychiatrist at Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry,. PhD at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands in Neurobiology. Munich, Postdoc at University of Zurich, Switzerland and University of California San Francisco in molecular neurodegeneration. Since 2002 principal investigator at Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf in Molecular Psychiatry and Neurodegeneration. 2011 Zisking-Sommerfeld award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry.