The social origins of consciousness.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci November 13, 2025 Kristin Andrews, Noam Miller 3 citations
The social origins of consciousness hypothesis proposes that the original adaptive function of consciousness was to enable coordination with group members. Three arguments support this: a phylogenetic argument that consciousness is widespread among animals and likely evolved early to solve the problem of predicting others' behavior and staying together as a group during the Cambrian; a neuroscience argument that even simple brains have capacities for social rewards and pains, with modern brains retaining close connections between social cognition and affect; and an argument from deep adaptive alignment between social pain and harm to animals, building on William James (1890).