: we attribute attention to other people and therefore attribute it to ourselves (Graziano 2013). We would rather say that consciousness is a
model of meaning: we attribute it to others and therefore attribute it to ourselves. Consciousness is a function that results from mental activity, that is, thinking:
“It is the ability to extract from mental activity its algorithms (methods), to evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy, the quality of one’s actions, to program, regulate and control them. A person extracts the criteria of consciousness from the environment, from its phenomena and moral and ethical standards accepted in the family, the environment and society as a whole” (Wiesel 2021, p. 136).
Consciousness was not given to humans from the beginning. Julian Jaynes wrote in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) that humans originally had no consciousness and that it only emerged in historical times, perhaps in the age of writing. (Self-)consciousness arose when the “voices” that told a person what to do became the voice of his own mind. He finds confirmation of this in the poems of Homer and other ancient authors:
“In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself” (Jaynes 1976, p. 75). “Once established, once a man can ‘know himself,’ as Solon advised, can place ‘times’ together in the side-by-sideness of mind-space, can ‘see’ into himself and his world with the ‘eye’ of his noos [mind], the divine voices are unnecessary, at least to everyday life. They have been pushed aside into special places called temples or special persons called oracles. And that the new unitary nous (as it came to be spelled), absorbing the functions of the other hypostases, was successful is attested by all the literature that followed, as well as the reorganization of behavior and society” (ibid., pp. 287-8).