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This is not going to be an attempt to explain consciousness. That is something that has been tried from a number of perspectives, and many writers believe that they have been successful. Despite this, for many people the problem of consciousness remains unresolved. Researchers and writers often end up walking around the problem, and that is going to happen here, too.

In studying groups, their role in society, and the behaviour of individuals in both, it is however unavoidable to try to understand how consciousness functions, to describe what takes place within consciousness and how that relates to other activities taking place elsewhere in the brain, and also how it relates to the individual's behaviour in the outside world, with particular reference to groups.

The weight of evidence and opinion, some of which is presented below, is in the direction of a very major role for consciousness for the individual actor in society (in groups). We'll walk around the question of whether consciousness evolved for that purpose, or for another purpose, and the question of when it originated. What seems clear is that conscious activity is the key contributor to the 'face' presented by an individual in a group. There is also a large but not overwhelming body of opinion holding that consciousness was the means by which the group's collective beliefs and moral structures were implanted into individuals, and that an understanding of personal individuality came into the psyche only later. This is more contentious, obviously.

It's important to distinguish the cognitive activities that take place in the illuminated arena of awareness from that awareness itself. It's the existence of this 'illuminated area of awareness' which is difficult to explain convincingly.

There is no a priori reason why most of the cognitive activities that take place within consciousness should have to take place within 'awareness' rather than outside it. Thinking to oneself, 'Ah, that is Jones and look, today he is growing a beard', is an activity that could perfectly well take place in an unconscious part of the brain, and probably does, alongside the fact that one is aware of it. 'What shall I do next?' is a slightly more difficult case; but this is a question that the brain is answering on all sorts of levels all the time. What is the biological or evolutionary benefit of having awareness of the posing and/or answering of this question?

The relevance of this discussion to groups comes about because many evolutionary biologists believe that consciousness arose or at least gained greater salience as a part of groupishness: because the complexity of the moment-to-moment decision process when surrounded by perhaps dozens of your peers, and needing to take into account a complex mass of moral precepts, both internalized and external, required a filtering process, and that consciousness is the most effective way of creating such a filter.

There is no longer a suggestion, however, that expanded consciousness could have been a result of selection at the group level. This 'group selectionist' view which briefly held currency in the mid- to late 20th century has been discredited.

Working against the view that consciousness evolved to mediate social behaviour is the fact that consciousness is not a very efficient organizing or directing agency; the evidence for this is explored later in this section.

Whether consciousness actually arose as part of the development of social groups, or was simply expanded from a more basic facility of sensual awareness, the higher order 'social' consciousness seems likely to have had access only to appropriate 'groupish' or 'social' parts of the brain. In fact, even our modern consciousness only has access to very selective parts of the cognitive process, and in a very imperfect way, although the scope of consciousness and its access pathways to other parts of the brain have without doubt expanded enormously since the time of early humans. Much of this expansion may have occurred when language developed, allowing the inter-generational teaching of skills in a symbolic way and not just by 'showing how it's done'. It can be argued that symbolic language (human speech, specifically) would have been mediated by and accessible to consciousness from the beginning. It certainly feels that way now, although that's no proof that it happened that way originally.

The belief of some evolutionary biologists that consciousness as such evolved along with human society (along with groupishness, if you like), doesn't sound particularly convincing unless heavily qualified. Most people would perhaps think that when a dog puts his head on one side and looks at you, deciding whether to bark or not, then he is going through some decision process which probably has some conscious element. OK, a dog is a social animal, not only living in groups in the wild, but also with social awareness of human behaviour. But if the dog is conscious, then consciousness arose at a much earlier stage of evolution than the human kin-group, unless you want to believe that doggy consciousness was bred into them by humans.

Of course, consciousness in a dog is not necessarily the same as consciousness in a person; for that matter, consciousness in a 21st century human is not necessarily the same as consciousness in a 13th century human. Again, however, that may be merely to say that the behavioural decision process in a 21st century human is subject to a different (wider?) set of influences than the process in a 13th century human. Still, there is wide agreement that consciousness in the sense of the self-awareness of the individual of himself as an independent actor in human affairs is something that has enormously expanded in very modern times. In a sense this is a negation of the group; if consciousness in individuals originally came about through the injection of 'collective consciousness' into the individual psyche, then the later process of individuation equates to separation from the group.

It is certainly not a recent idea that awareness of self is a by-product, and a necessary one, of the process of social development in humans. Many 19th century writers, of whom Durkheim is just the most prominent, believed that to be the case. And in 1934 G H Mead, in 'Mind, Self and Society', wrote: 'the self, as that which can be an object to itself, ie essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience . . . . it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience'. Mead's formulation has often been criticized, along with other 'social performance' theorizing; but it holds true as an example of the importance attached by successive waves of theorists to the role of social development in enlarging or creating aspects of consciousness.

One tempting suggestion is that consciousness results from the need to incorporate external inputs or content with internal states and content. It's even possible that given the history of development of the brain, there wasn't an elegant way other than the invention of consciousness to create a decision forum in which external inputs could be married to internal inputs on a dynamic basis. It's not specially convincing, but if it were true, then how much more true it would become when those external inputs began to include the information in other people's brains, libraries and the media.

It's quite a problem, to decide whether to ask Jones (jokingly) if he has not got enough money to buy a razor, when you know that the leader of the group (Mrs Thatcher) has a prejudice against bearded men, and yet on the other hand you are competing with Jones for a ministerial post. On the other hand, how often have you felt a subconscious warning when about to make such a joke; and how often has it turned out that your subsconscious was right? The conscious is not a good decision forum, especially when multiple levels of intentionality are involved; the subconscious (meaning, the whole brain except for the tiny bit of it that deals in awareness) is just far better at synthesizing complex sets of information and developing appropriate behaviour. This seems to be a fairly strong argument against the bespoke development of consciousness as a mediator of social activity - nature would have done a better job - and suggests that if consciousness is indeed a primary actor in social activity, then evolution just made use of the best tool there was to hand, which was an under-used facility for self-awareness.

It's certain however that the use of library or Internet content in a decision process is moderated by consciousness, and arguable that it has to be so (this would be a real change in human cognitive psychology, brought about by the development of the ESS). If a person sitting at breakfast and trying to decide whether to rob a bank at lunchtime needs to go to a library to look up the type of security precautions employed by banks, it would be a peculiar thing for him to suddenly say to his wife, 'I'm going to the library' without conscious awareness of why he was going to the library. It's logical for him to go to the library, and if his wife wasn't there, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary for him to be aware of the reason; but in practice he will be confronted throughout the day with similar situations in which he will have to make complex behavioural decisions involving other people.

Once more, it seems that consciousness may be part of evolution's solution to the problem of mixing internal and external inputs in social situations. The origin of self-awareness (= consciousness) is likely on these arguments to have been at the time when individuals needed to start being aware of themselves as separate actors within social groups, which may have been long before even primates had evolved.

One notable aspect of the modern consciousness is its focus on the passage of historical time. There is no particular reason to suppose that an evolved consciousness, to the extent that its contents might result from genetic endowment, would have a sense of historical time. For what purpose? The awareness of time in human consciousness is therefore perhaps a cultural product. It is a concept which has been injected into consciousness as part of a group-driven need for the acceptance of society as a complex organism, the idea of progress, the idea of civic responsibility, and other adjuncts of the nation state. This is just one of the ways in which consciousness is used both by external agencies and by the unconscious as a means of delivering desired behaviour by the individual. Others will appear below.

Despite the growing role in social and cultural development of institutions above the level of the basic human group, humans retain their groupish natures because they developed before external, over-arching social institutions became the focus of evolution, and genetically speaking, humans don't appear to have changed significantly in the last 30,000 years.

The group itself began in some sense as an archetype, since the individual members of a group would not be able to understand themselves as such unless they shared a collective (and of course unconscious) understanding of the concept of a group. Some writers suppose that the group has a psychic structure similar to that of an individual human, that is to say with a more or less conscious level and an underlying unconscious level of content.

It's possible therefore to conceive the 'dark' behaviour of some groups (Nazis naturally spring to mind) as being parallel to the regression of an individual personality into 'dark' behaviour as a result of an intolerable psychic situation.

A much more speculative idea is that the psychic structure of the individual in fact began as the psychic structure of the group, and that the conscious / unconscious division of the human mind as we know it is nothing but a group phenomenon copied into the members of the group. The problem of the evolution of individual consciousness has no adequate answers at this point, but it's easy to see how consciousness of being a member of a group could naturally evolve along with the psychic fact of the group.

In amongst the process of formation of 'group identity' in the individual comes the question of consciousness, and one possible explanation of consciousness, or one possible use of it, if you believe that consciouness predates humans, is as a repository of the knowledge of group identity.

Although consciousness may have originated way back in animal evolution, there's no doubt that cognitive power, and presumably consciousness as part of that, expanded greatly with the arrival of social groups. And as these groups became larger among early humans, the human brain became larger, allowing the development of conceptual language, the capacity to store a lexicon, the capacity to store information about multiple relationships, and the emergence of 'social' emotions such as empathy, including the grandly-titled Theory of Mind, that is, the ability to impute intentionality to other humans, something which is the sine qua non of a human social group. All this was delivered in the larger group by the larger brain (although separating cause and effect is controversial), although there was some sort of limit on group size at perhaps 150 individuals.

The larger, co-operative group was already effective enough for humans to compete successfully against the competition, both animal and Neanderthal. Nature was not tamed, but could be lived with. And with the development of the human social group came the emergence of morality as we now understand it.

It's not clear, however, how far consciousness is implicated in (or necessary for) human morality. Darwin believed that morality was capable of being created by evolution (ie, could be selected for), as he makes clear in The Descent of Man. In the mid-20th century, conventional thought went more in the direction of a cultural, non-genetic basis for morality (part of the great tabula rasa heresy) but by the end of the century the neo-Darwinists had reverted to an evolutionary explanation of morality.

As Michael Ruse says in The Darwinian Paradigm (p 231): 'You might object, with Immanuel Kant, that true morality occurs only when one is a totally disinterested participant. . . Evolutionists . . . argue that the evolved sense of morality in humans indeed does not necessarily involve conscious manipulation or calculation of possible return. In fact, evolutionists argue that one will probably function most efficiently when one has no hope of return at all. ' In other words, it is not the conscious mind which is involved in the delivery of moral behaviour.

Is it most effective for moral rules to be unconscious, conscious, or external?

Desired behaviour is the result of moral rules which are taken on board, or at any rate, obeyed by the individual. Broadly speaking, there are three levels or channels through which these rules can be delivered:

Unconscious imperatives (eg reciprocal altruism as developed by evolution);
Conscious imperatives (eg 'I believe in the 10 Commandments' and therefore I will not steal);
Externally imposed rules (eg by the State or a group to which one belongs).

It's likely that the set of moral precepts that developed along with the basic groupishness of humans are housed and delivered unconsciously. The feelings that demand fairness in relationships, that drive gossiping behaviour (gossip is an important component of groupedness), that make grooming important both to the giver and the receiver (grooming both in the physical sense but even more in the verbal sense), just to pick a few of the many dozens or probably hundreds of components of group behaviour, are not habitually experienced consciously.

On the other hand, sets of external moral precepts (eg the 10 Commandments) are clearly intended to operate primarily through consciousness, and externally. You can drill it into a child for 10 years at school, at home, and in church, that he shouldn't steal, and some of that may get fixed in the unconscious; but in the real world, society relies on the ever-presence of external prohibitions and sanctions to control behaviour. When the child, as a teenager, is in the off-licence and about to put the half-bottle of brandy into his coat pocket, he may be stopped by an ingrained sentiment, but it is much more likely that he will remember vividly the words he heard at sunday school, or the movie he saw last night in which the hero was caught stealing and shot by the sheriff. Again, there is a suggestion that consciousness may be about marrying external input to internal states, although in this case the external input is remembered rather than directly perceived.

It seems to follow that only the most basic behavioural rules can be delivered entirely through the collective unconscious, that is to say, as part of the moral baggage that travels with group membership. On the other hand, it isn't true that external rules are only experienced consciously. The rules pertaining to a particular group (as opposed to the rules which apply to all groups) may be delivered through the conscious, or at the minimum through observation of how group members behave, but they can be housed in and applied by the unconscious in most situations. Patriotism is an example of this; it's not a basic groupish requirement that you should die for your group at its request. But the group called a nation does by example and by explicit requirement demand that a member should be prepared to die in the interest of the group, in certain circumstances. This is so drilled into people by history books, movies and military training (external delivery of the rules) that when the awful moment comes they don't (except in rare cases) need to go through any conscious decision process. In fact, the group relies on the fact that they won't.

At the same time, it is clear that the typical individual's understanding of her position in society has evolved substantially in the last few hundred years. You could say that consciousness has enlarged to take in many more dimensions of a social being. At a stretch, you could say that whereas 500 years ago, for most people morality was largely unseen and unfelt at a conscious level, with behaviour being driven by unconscious structures, now a far larger proportion of people would be able to give a coherent account of their ethical positions. You could say that this amounts to the emergence of moral structures out of the unconscious into the conscious, accompanied by a reduction in the role of overtly external moral controls. However, you would also have to say that the moral structure which has emerged into consciousness is much weaker than its original unconscious forbear, and that people on the whole are much less inclined to accept external moral controls (even though the State is far more able to enforce them).

The appearance of deception as an inter-personal, social technique is possibly associated with the beginnings of a theory of mind and an understanding of intentionality. Deception is described among a very wide range of animal species, and certainly existed as an adaptive technique long before the emergence of social groupings of animals, but individual behaviour intended to deceive one or more conspecifics emerges only as part of 'groupish' behaviour (eg among some primates), and seems to require at least a primitive ability to think of the other as different from oneself.

Recent work on self-deception shows how strongly the human consciousness is used by various parts of the psyche and the external group for their own purposes, and is strongly at odds with any view that consciousness has a directing role in human behaviour. Prominent in the exploration of human self-deception has been Robert Trivers, who describes multiple forms of self-deception which surface in the consciousness, including:

the enhancement of deception of others;
input from the internal voices of significant others, notably including parents;
the results of internal genetic conflict, particularly between maternal and paternal genes; and
creating a favourable future orientation.

What could be the purpose of self-deception? The answer surely has to do with social interactions, and more specifically those in groups. Says Trivers: 'Because deception is easily selected between individuals, it may also generate self-deception, the better to hide ongoing deception from detection by others. In this view, the conscious mind is, in part, maintained to deceive others'.

Incidentally, the theory of self-deception easily explains why anthropologists fell into the error (now widely admitted) of group selectionism.

A highly significant physiological fact is that while it takes about 20 ms for a nervous signal to reach the brain from for example a finger, and the finger can respond in 50 ms, the signal does not register in consciousness (if at all) for 500 ms. A nervous 'round-trip' involving cognitive processing may take between 100 and 200 ms. In addition, the registering of a conscious 'intention' to act takes 350 ms from its neuronal origins, and there is a further 200 ms between the registering of the intention and the carrying out of the action. Says Trivers: 'It seems as if our conscious mind is more of an on-looker than a decision-maker'.

While it's easy to see a beneficial role for self-deception in the individual per se, and even more so in the individual as a member of the group, it can have negative consequences at a group level. It is all too easy for the members of a group to reinforce each other's self-deceiving, often inflated, attitudes. This has its most destructive consequences in war. That doesn't seem likely to have been an 'intentional' evolutionary result, since it can't improve fitness to have groups destroying each other. Or can it, in an over-populated region?. The groups that survived would be those in which group self-deception was closest to reality, ie the groups which not only believed themselves to be strong, but actually were so. This effect could be achieved by having institutionalised dissent within a group.

After the hunter-gatherer epoch came a stage in the development of society came farming, some technology, lots of trade, and eventually the state and religion as an evolution of the group, all allowing (and requiring) larger numbers of individuals to cooperate.

The State and religion don't seem to have been adaptations driven by competition to survive against other species; instead, the competition was by now presumably between different human groups, at a cultural level. (While group selectionism has been discredited as regards the evolution of genetically transmitted traits, there is no objection to the idea that groups compete against each other in cultural terms).

Anyway, what were the adaptations needed for these now larger groups to be successful? The communication of information between generations (writing, books, schools) and the use of texts (the 10 Commandments) to control large groups. This stage occupies the early parts of recorded history (it wouldn't exist for us if recording hadn't been possible!) including the Chinese, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.

Then comes the Nation State, for which printing seems to have been the necessary evolution - a way of educating, informing, controlling masses of people who would have been beyond the reach of copyists. In the previous stage, morality was no longer an ever-renewed function of the group, but was still delivered and enforced via religion. In fact, many communities were not that far away from the original kin-group level (guilds, villages etc, able to maintain a local moral structure based on the shared knowledge of their members). With the Nation State came anomie, anti-social behaviour, the 'working class', the -isms, and above all, modern warfare.

Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, dates the growth of national consciousness (the consciousness of belonging to a nation in an individual) to the spread of nation states in the 17th to 19th centuries, and that in turn as having been mainly driven by the emergence of national 'print-languages' which fostered a feeling of community among their users (readers), although 'print-languages' and nations were by no means co-terminous. The language of print in Europe, until the arrival of Martin Luther in the 16th century, had been exclusively Latin. After that, printing in the vernacular spread rapidly. It follows that prior to the 16th century, the consciousness of all individuals other than very well educated ones was unaffected by direct delivery of printed ideas. The parson in his pulpit could of course could and did deliver ideas and morals in the vernacular.

Whatever the exact mechanism, the expansion of individual consciousness to embrace 'national' feelings is evident, and it had many unpleasant consequences, alongside a few good ones. It's not unreasonable to date the decay of group-driven society from the fact of the emergence of the nation state. Benedict points out that: 'all profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias'. In this way the group consciousness that was so strong in humans up to the late Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the power of 'national' consciousness.

Modern psycho-social researchers see the invention of printing and later expansions of the media as in some way an extension of human consciousness. It's obvious that a dictionary, or a thesaurus, or even a grammar, can be used by a human to underpin their linguistic resources, and that libraries and other stores of content are in some sense supplementary to the internal resources of the human brain. They can be and are used extensively by writers, researchers and just plain interested people to supplement their own internal cognitive resources.

It's not even unreasonable to see the expanded reach of consciousness as an evolutionary adaptation that adds to the fitness of individuals, the groups they belong to, and eventually society as a whole.

Physical means of extending linguistic consciousness have been succeeded by other types of recording technique, including video, DVD, movies, and computer storage. All these add to the reach of consciousness.

Alongside the development of storage media has come an expansion in the means of communication that are available to humans. The telephone, television, radio, the humble fax and mobile phones can all be seen as supplementary to the basic senses with which biological evolution had equipped humans. With these expanded senses we can explore the expanded content universe at will.

The coping-stone of this pyramid of extra awareness is of course the Internet. A normally well-educated human can use the Internet to access the totality of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, and to apply it to life situations. Unlike other inventions that have increased human consciousness, however, the Internet plays to the strength of groupishness.

After the Nation State comes what? There have always been individuals who were strong and clear-seeing enough to have their own moral structures, but they were a tiny minority. Increasing economic wealth, better education (sort of!), more leisure, and better access to information have created very large numbers of people with some independence of action; but there are no structures to accommodate them. The old institutions which incorporated groupish ideas have decayed, and 'let 1,000 flowers bloom' when imposed on a top-down basis merely creates 999 weeds for every flower.