IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 58

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The Co-Evolution of Language
and Consciousness

Figure 2. Rene Descartes.

to what I've termed Survival-Reproduction (or S-R)
Value. And we can acknowledge benefit or harm relative to those beliefs and their efficacy as they are
incorporated into survival strategies, which we
believe will lead to greater S-R Value.
4) Another extremely important factor in the emergence
of consciousness is that we have a strong sense of
mortality. As depicted in the eventual customs and
burial rituals of our ancestors, we know that we are
going to die. This paints a very clear conceptual picture about our own lives. Knowing finitude in terms
of existential ontology more clearly provides knowledge agents - in this case, us - with the capacity to
better understand the importance of actions in relation to S-R Value. Knowing that some conscious decisions may well decrease one's S-R Value to 0, i.e.,
death, provides greater insight into one's own existence and the awareness of actions which may help
or hinder it.
5) The gradual development of human consciousness
has also led to the emergence of a theory of mind.
That is, we developed a very good capacity not only
for seeing the world from the vantage of others, but in
making associations about the behaviour of others
based on that capacity. This has given rise to an
increased ability in understanding our social standing, our abilities in making inferences about the
thoughts of others, spotting deception, and for emotional feelings such as empathy.

Human consciousness did not simply emerge in a vacuum. There were a number of factors that contributed to
its development. (For a more complete analysis of this
relationship, see [3].) Arguably, the most important
among these was language. The co-evolution of language and consciousness provided our ancestors with
the newly developed - though gradually acquired -
sense of mental abstraction wherein they could now
see themselves in relation to the world (and its attributes), their kin, their extended social networks (the ingroup) and those in the out-groups. They could then
better articulate and understand relationships between
themselves, their environment, and others. The greater
their ability to articulate concepts through language
regarding the various relationships within their experiences, the more aware they would have become of
these relationships. And reciprocally, the more aware
they become of relationships between themselves, the
world and others, the more need there would be to be
able to articulate and understand those relationships in
order not only to make better sense of their experiences, but to mentally rank them in terms of their suspected S-R Value.
Nobody knows for sure how the actualization of the
natural historical time period of our ancestors' individual and group consciousness came to be. Nobody knows
precisely when it happened, nor for how long. All we
have are historical clues, the understanding and use of
consistent logic, and the desire to put the anthropological and archaeological pieces together in as epistemically responsible manner as possible.

AI Consciousness
If, by analogy, humans are at their most basic level
essentially biological machines, and our ancestors
such as the Australopithecines possessed much
smaller brains and lacked the consciousness we now
possess today, then we can conclude that at some
point in our ancestral past, consciousness emerged
through the gradual development of the evolution of
our species that gradually gave rise to H. sapiens. We
can then validly infer that such a quality as consciousness may also emerge in other machines that
we construct and imbue with artificial intelligence.
But just as airplanes do not flap their wings like birds
in order to fly, we should not expect that the quality
of consciousness in AI will be precisely like that of
humans - although it may very well be. Though the
laws of physics for flight are universal across all flying things, we should consider to what extent the
laws governing conscious thought may or may not be
the same for AI.

IEEE TEchnology and SocIETy MagazInE

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DECEmbEr 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016