Consciousness as “Super-perception”
Like Technological Innovations and Linguistic Coinages, Consciousness Greatly Extends Our Senses, Increasing Adaptability
Summary: The blog post titled “Consciousness as ‘Super-perception'” by Brian J. McVeigh explores Julian Jaynes’s theory that consciousness is not merely a passive awareness but an advanced form of perception shaped by language and culture. Jaynes proposed that early humans operated under a “bicameral mind,” where decisions were guided by auditory hallucinations perceived as commands from gods. As societies evolved, language and cultural complexities led to the development of introspective consciousness.
McVeigh suggests that consciousness functions as a “super-perception,” allowing individuals to interpret and internalize external stimuli in complex ways. This perspective emphasizes that consciousness is not an innate biological trait but a learned behavior emerging from linguistic and cultural developments. By understanding consciousness as a culturally acquired skill, we can better appreciate the historical and social factors that have shaped human thought and self-awareness.
People commonly confuse and conflate sensory perception with Jaynesian consciousness. Indeed, this is why in much of my writing I have stressed their distinction. However, here I argue that despite their important differences, they are nevertheless intimately related. Consciousness is grounded in our perceptual processes and it is informed by, entangled in, and in many ways defined by sensory engagements with the environment. Consider that consciousness operates because many of the metaphors of mind are rooted in physioperceptual interactions with the world.
Consciousness can be conceived as a new kind of “super-perception,” appearing only about three millennia ago, a mere blink of the eye on the evolutionary timescale. Not a product of genetics, it was linguistically acquired, transmitted socially from one generation to the next, and cannot be reduced to neurological structures; it is more a “nurture” than a “nature” phenomenon. Being culturally cultivated and historically invented, consciousness is not simply generated by certain parts of the brain, any more than ideas about politics, art, or philosophy are. It is a type of adaptation and affords us a secret, safe stage on which we can test out behaviors and ideas. It allows us to run simulations of behaviors, thereby permitting us to save time and avoid risks and the unnecessary expenditure of physical energy. Consciousness, then, expands and magnifies our senses to novel realms of adaptability.
Perception is not consciousness, and strictly speaking we are neither conscious of the cognitive machinery that produces perception nor perception itself. But we can introspect upon “conscious-ized percepts” (or what might be termed “consciously interiorized perception” or “conscious percepts”). However we describe such forms of subjective qualia, consciousness elevates sensory encounters with the world to a completely new level of complexity, greatly amplifying such interfaces, and creating a powerful adaptation by constructing an introcosm of virtual quasi-perceptions. We mistakenly label interiorized percepts and even abstract thoughts as “perception.” However, such subjective qualia are built upon our consciousless sensory apparatus. Through metaphoric scaffolding, both through the centuries as well as during a person’s sociolinguistic development, the operations of our senses are transmuted into sophisticated mentation.
The Mind Represents and Re-represents the World, Multiplying Our Mental Capabilities
Our current language is not equipped to delineate various psychological processes. So, at the risk of introducing jargon and for the sake of argument, I suggest some neologisms based on “ceptions” or what an organism experiences when its perceptuo-conceptual system interacts with its environment. This terminology is intended to show the relation between hallucinated voices and visions and conscious introspectable experiences. First are perceptions; these are nonconscious operations of the senses. Second are conceptions; these are nonconscious mental representations. Third are “superceptions”; these subsume three types. The first are “extraceptions” or audiovisual hallucinations interpreted as divine commands and visitations in ancient times. The second type of superception is “introceptions” or mental imagery (quasi-perceptions). Unlike consciousless conceptions, introceptions are re-representations. Mental imagery is a cultural ― not biological ― adaptation that emerged relatively recently in human history (about three millennia ago). In other words, imagery is a learned ability, not an innate faculty.
The third type of superception are vestigial extraceptions. These are anomalous behaviors, e.g., hallucinations still suffered by schizophrenics. Hallucinatory reduplications of one’s own body (autoscopy, out-of-body experiences, heautoscopy) are most likely related to the reactivation of vestigial neurostructures that cause hallucinations. Such “self-hallucinations,” similar to the ubiquitous theophanies recorded in ancient texts, are remnants of an older neuropsychology. Understanding present-day atypical behavior aids us in appreciating the hallucinatory nature of subjective inner visualizations (i.e., mental imagery) as adaptations in modern times.
Mental Imagery as an Adaptation
Important affinities link introceptions (“inner sensations”) with extraceptions, i.e., both are hallucinatory and project images in the mind that do not necessarily portray the reality that our senses register. But there are crucial differences: Mental imagery is volitionally controlled, less vivid, mostly believed to be transpiring somewhere “within” the individual, and is regarded as somehow less real than physical existence. Hallucinations are avolitional, can be very vivid, typically are perceived to have origins external to the person, and are usually interpreted as real. We have insight that mental imagery does not necessarily reflect reality, while hallucinators often lack such insight. What is significant is how in the same way extraceptions were at one time adaptive, introceptions (mental imagery) is also an adaptation.
To conclude, we also might mention one more type of ception: Coceptions. These describe the coinciding of conscious percepts with introceptions; such overlapping deludes us into assuming that interiorized qualia are mere sensory reflections of reality.
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