Last week I quoted from a 19th century article by Chauncey Wright, mentor of the Harvard-based Metaphysical Club, concerning the beginnings of self-consciousness in humans. He compared it with flight in birds. I'll try to elucidate.
"The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one."
The bracketing is mine, the parenthesis is Wright's.
Our observing angel presumably is aware of mental activity in a range of animals -- stimulus is followed (often after some gap in time as if for deliberation) by response. Monkey sees some food out of reach. Monkey looks around, sees a long stick, uses it to extend his reach for the food.
But then a particular "naked ape" appears who has another power. Not only does he reason, he is aware that he is reasoning. Our angel could not have foreseen this. It comes, when it comes, just as a brute fact. Why did the new power emerge? There are explanations in terms of adaptation -- and Darwin's ORIGIN OF SPECIES had been published in 1859, that is, a full fourteen years before -- Wright was in the thick of the consequent debates. DESCENT OF MAN had been published more recently, but the world had not waited for Darwin himself to come around to the case of humans for Darwin's admirers to draw the connection from his 1859 premises to likely conclusions.
Anyway: adaptations are easy enough to imagine. Self-consciousness means I am aware that beings around me who look like me probably have their own selves, their own interior lives, too. It may spur empathy and cooperation, at first mostly within small groups/tribes, and such developments may in turn have done a lot for survival and perpetuation of the breed.
But our angel could not in principle have predicted this, except as a guess. Something novel had to come into the world for it to be known in a "purely empirical way," as Wright said.
This sounds like an emergentism theory, BUT ... it is not entirely clear whether it is, so to speak, ontological emergence or epistemological emergence to which it refers. Wright's reference to the finite nature of the angel's intelligence suggests that he wants to exclude an omniscient observer, but also suggests that he is talking about what can be known (by all creatures whose knowledge is in essence limited). What is novel in the sense that it could not have been predicted by such a being may not be the same as what is novel in the sense that it is ... ontologically novel.
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