Consciousness may have evolved to help living beings reconcile competing needs when survival is at stake, rather than simply emerging from more advanced intelligence. This theoretical paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Jeff Stibel, a cognitive scientist and author who is a trustee of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Tufts University, proposes viewing cognition and consciousness as the products of different evolutionary pressures. Cognition helped organisms navigate uncertainty, while the regulatory processes underlying consciousness helped them maintain their own existence and manage competing demands.
Personal context and the theory’s origins
“This paper was deeply personal. It grew out of years of conversations with my late mentor Dan Dennett, who encouraged me to formalise some thoughts about the evolutionary differences between cognition and consciousness,” Stibel explained. “When Dan passed away, I felt an obligation to return to our discussions, and advances in AI made this even more pressing. I was drawn to a growing suspicion that we were asking the wrong question: treating consciousness as the highest level of intelligence, when it looks more like a separate adaptation with its own evolutionary task. There seemed to be an urgency to this, as AI is becoming increasingly capable, and there is a widespread assumption that a sufficiently intelligent machine will simply ‘wake up’, or already has. That narrative is everywhere, and I think it rests on the same confusion.”
Stibel brings together existing research in cell biology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. He traces a possible progression from cells protecting their boundaries to organisms coordinating multiple needs under conditions of uncertainty, limited resources and potentially irreversible consequences.
Three levels of regulation and testable predictions
The author outlines six predictions to make the framework testable. They concern whether conscious engagement increases when demands compete; whether different needs must become comparable; whether attention, bodily state, memory and readiness to act change together; whether consciousness fades when this coordination is disrupted or less necessary; how these abilities differ across species; and whether artificial systems require genuine pressures to maintain their own existence. The proposed experiments would vary conflict or risk while keeping sensory input constant, disrupt coordination while preserving simpler processing, or compare artificial systems with different requirements for maintaining their own existence. The paper also identifies potentially refuting findings, including the persistence of consciousness despite an impaired ability to reconcile competing needs.
The central argument describes three levels of regulation. “Protocontrol” protects an organism’s integrity, for example by maintaining a cell’s membrane and limiting destructive processes; the paper explicitly does not describe this as conscious. “Metacontrol” manages conflicts between individual regulatory processes. “Reconciliation control” makes competing needs comparable and coordinates them into an overall course of action. For example, a hungry animal encountering food near a possible predator must weigh feeding against danger. A decision to retreat would entail coordinated changes in attention, bodily readiness, movement and learning. Stibel identifies consciousness with this coordinated state in a system whose continued existence depends on its own regulation.
Application to artificial intelligence
Applied to artificial intelligence, the argument is that greater capability alone will not produce consciousness: a system also needs to maintain its own existence and resolve competing demands with real consequences for its continued existence. “The implication for AI is stark. Scaling up today’s models makes them better predictors, rather than systems with something of their own at stake. Large language models have no boundaries and no self to protect, and humans provide everything they need,” Stibel told PsyPost. “In that sense, the problem is not that they are too simple or fall short of AGI. They are too pampered. Without real skin in the game, no amount of capability will magically turn into consciousness.”
The paper does not limit consciousness to biological organisms. However, an artificial system would need more than programmed self-preservation: its continued functioning would have to depend on conditions it maintains itself. Stibel emphasised the implications: “The most important takeaway is that biology and evolution reframe the debate about AI. The fear that we will accidentally scale up to a suffering machine and the excitement among engineers that digital minds are just around the corner both rest on conflating intelligence with consciousness. If these really are different things, then consciousness is not something that creeps up on us through sheer capability. It is a specific kind of organisation that we would have to build deliberately, and I would say we have good reasons not to do so. Understanding this distinction properly is how we choose our ethics rather than stumble into them.”
Measurement challenges and ethical questions
Testing this concept poses a fundamental problem: researchers can investigate whether a system has the proposed abilities to maintain its own existence and coordinate its needs, but they cannot directly observe whether it has subjective experience. “The biggest unresolved issue is measurement,” Stibel said. “You cannot observe consciousness in anyone but yourself, so the paper proposes testing the necessary precursors. The central question in the test is whether a system is genuinely working to maintain its own existence under constraints, rather than simply responding to threats it was designed to detect. Turning this into an actual experiment, in both biological and artificial systems, is the difficult road ahead.”
Stibel also pointed to an unresolved ethical question: “There is also a deeper question that the paper raises but does not resolve. If we ever created a system with a genuine stake in its own survival, we would have created something that can be harmed, a moral patient whose interests might not align with ours. That is a line we should understand well long before we approach it, rather than afterwards.”
The paper “From Chemistry to Cognition: The Adaptive Origins of Consciousness Under Constraints” was written by Jeff Stibel.
Source: PsyPost – Psychology News
