Consciousness is possible only when we label or recognize. It could be a person, an object, a process or an idea.
But the act of labeling is a guided by group thinking. The biological process of accepting a visual or auditary thing and translating
into an tangible thing can happen if my thalamus and memory have previously registered and mapped that thing.
A and B could be seeing something but whence comes the agreement that they have seen the same thing. Who decides and how ?
Fundamentally persons A and B are not cognizant of each others existence. How do they recognize each other ?
For that they need to communicate but how do they recognize that communication and come to an agreement. What each person says and hears is agnostic of one another.
In the absence of an externally accepted mapping that both can look up to, there is no communication, no recognition or consciousness whatsoever.
There are clues from studying how children learn, their basic learning is driven by mapping their crucial needs to tangibles.
When a child gets internal food pangs and starts crying as an instinctive reaction, its mother feeds milk. The child maps the hunger instinct to a tangible called "milk" and initiates that substitution. When the father slaps the child when it randomly touches the remote, it maps pain signal to the instinct of arbitrary play. Observe that all its basic leanings are mapped to its instincts.
Determining how early man obtained his consciousness would be considerably more complex. Assuming all men were at the same intellectual level at one point the act of feeding milk to a baby could logically trigger the substitution of milk to hunger.
Problem is in the present day that substitution is validated by the intelligence of the parents but the early baby can neither validate nor communicate its findings to other babies, since there is no universally accepted form of communication that all early men recognize.
The mappings or findings remain unique to each experience holder.
In the absence of such a global mapping how did consciousness evolve is a complex question.
It is not easily explained or validated but the solution lies in the extrapolation. If the father or mother is mapping the child's instincts to tangibles because the person who maps is already out of chrysalis. Assuming all early men were at onetime in chrysalis the instinct to perceivable should have been created by someone who was already out of it.
Who is that agent ? How did that form of self-introspective self-knowledge come upon him ? The billion dollar question !!!
