Phylogenetic/Evolutionary Additional Theories

Staub's Consciousness and Biological Evolution

Independent researcher John Staub claims consciousness resulted after a half-billion-year process of vertebrate evolution. Fish brains run on full automatic. Birds use maternal love, pre-wired in the brain, to help their vulnerable eggs survive. Although mammals can be self-aware and might feel something like guilt, they lack any sense of morality. Only humans have gained both consciousness and that essential ingredient called free will (Staub, 2025).

Is self-awareness merely an illusion that helps mammals survive? Staub says yes. But is consciousness also an illusion? Here, he says no. “Consciousness is more than a survival mechanism.” To him, the key to understanding consciousness is free will. He suggests an unknown force or energy, working at the quantum level within brain neurons, directs electron movement. But if this energy is undirected, you’re back to square one, no free will. “What directs this force or energy?” For lack of a better word, he calls it “God” and calls this dualistic alliance of God and brain “consciousness.”

A reasonable question: If God is running the show, why aren’t all decisions perfect? Staub’s answer: “God’s abilities are limited. Only a tiny fraction of God’s imperfect essence resides within everyone’s brain, with each person’s consciousness, unique.”

Staub argues a person can believe both free will and God exist, or neither. “The laws of physics won’t let you pick and choose.” Prove free will is impossible, and life will become meaningless, with society quickly devolving into nihilism.

Motivation becomes crucial. “Why would a God give humans consciousness? And why did it take 14 billion years to create a human?” To Staub, the answer seems obvious. “God is not omnipotent, is not physical, and is extremely limited in our physical universe.” He wrote these words fifty years ago: “We are the eyes, the ears, and hands of God, and in return, we are given the sense of beauty, of music, and of love.”

Gleason’s Subconscious Transfer

Independent researcher Greg Gleason posits that evolution has produced a brain comprised of two parts, consciousness and non-consciousness, and that consciousness does nothing, existing only as a stage or venue for what the non-conscious brain transfers to it. The non-conscious brain produces everything of which we become aware in consciousness. What appears in consciousness is there only temporarily, usually very briefly (Gleason, 2025).

To Gleason, understanding how decision-making works is key to understanding what consciousness is. No one ever “made” a decision, he says. The infinite regression that “making” decisions would require means “making” decisions is impossible. Deciding happens when what is decided upon occurs to us to be the thing to do, the thing to say, the thing to choose, or the thing to think about. Like nearly everything else in our lives, deciding occurs to us. Whatever is in consciousness occurs to us there.

While everything of which we are conscious first occurs in the non-conscious brain, not all of what occurs in the non-conscious brain is transferred to and occurs in consciousness. Sleepwalking, talking in one’s sleep, and behavior while hypnotized are instances of thoughts and decisions that occur in the non-conscious brain but which do not transfer to consciousness. So are most of the myriad decisions that go into producing routine behaviors such as opening a door or typing this note. The non-conscious brain does not make us aware of most of them. They happen, but not in consciousness. Any decisions of which we are aware appear in consciousness immediately upon having been produced in the non-conscious brain.

Just as all decisions are produced in the non-conscious brain, so is all thought produced there. We are aware of what the non-conscious brain decides to make us aware of on the stage of consciousness. We are aware of sensation in consciousness as the non-conscious brain processes and interprets it. Sensation occurs to the non-conscious brain. What the non-conscious brain makes of it appears to us in consciousness. Gleason wonders, “I wonder what thoughts my non-conscious brain has had that I don’t know about.”

Kramer’s Neurotoxic Bootstrap Hypothesis

Software/AI engineer Andre Kramer’s Neurotoxic Bootstrap Hypothesis holds that phenomenal consciousness arose from the need to detect when environmental neurotoxic chemicals had compromised not only an organism’s bodily state but also the perceptual and regulatory processes by which it judged reality. The resulting distinction between the organism being altered and the external source of alteration may have helped generate the first experienced division between self and world: a unified sense that “something has changed me.”

The hypothesis distinguishes a rapidly changing active state (A) from a slower normative state (N). Their multidimensional difference, A−N, or normalized contrast, (A−N)/(A+N+ε), is what constitutes a field of experienced tension: what it feels like for an organism’s present condition to diverge from what it expects, remembers, or requires itself to be. Intoxication may perturb both A and N, but differently across systems and timescales. Partially independent sensory, interoceptive, vestibular, mnemonic, and action-control processes can therefore fail to reach a quorum. Loosely analogous to N-version programming, their structured divergence becomes globally available as a second-order diagnosis: “I am altered; my present impressions should not be trusted or acted upon normally.” This diagnosis need not be conceptual or linguistic; the phrase is shorthand for a globally felt reduction in confidence. Phenomenal unity arises because many local disturbances are integrated as one organism-level condition—“this is happening to me.”

The proposal shares Damasio’s emphasis on homeostatic feeling (Damasio & Damasio, 2022, 2023), Gray’s comparator and late-error-detection account (Gray, 1995, 2004), and Lau’s perceptual reality monitoring (Lau, 2022). It differs by identifying environmental neurotoxic chemical perturbation as a plausible evolutionary bootstrap and by treating phenomenal unity as a fault-tolerant, cross-system response to compromise rather than as mere homeostatic monitoring, prediction error, higher-order tagging, or winner-takes-all broadcast. For hundreds of millions of years, plant-derived and other environmental neurotoxins are likely to have exerted sustained selection pressures on animal regulatory and avoidance systems (Hagen et al., 2009).

Once established, the same second-order capacity could be exapted for addiction avoidance, detection of gradual norm drift, reflective agency, and assent. The account is functionally specific but ontologically open: it is compatible with emergent neurobiological explanations or with views on which living organization recruits a more fundamental experiential aspect of nature (Kramer, 2026).

References

Avizienis, A. (1985). The N-version approach to fault-tolerant software. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-11(12), 1491–1501.

Damasio, A., & Damasio, H. (2022). Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness. Brain, 145(7), 2231–2235.

Damasio, A., & Damasio, H. (2023). Feelings are the source of consciousness. Neural Computation, 35(3), 277–286.

Gray, J. A. (1995). The contents of consciousness: A neuropsychological conjecture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18(4), 659–676.

Gray, J. A. (2004). Consciousness: Creeping Up on the Hard Problem. Oxford University Press.

Hagen, E. H., Sullivan, R. J., Schmidt, R., Morris, G., Kempter, R., & Hammerstein, P. (2009). Ecology and neurobiology of toxin avoidance and the paradox of drug reward. Neuroscience, 160(1), 69–84.

Lau, H. (2022). In Consciousness We Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Oxford University Press.

Kramer, A. (2026). Drugged into awareness: The Neurotoxic Bootstrap Hypothesis, Substack. https://andrekramer.substack.com/p/drugged-into-awareness

Vaskas’s Fostering Consciousness as Our Raison d'être

Artist/businessman/futurologist Georges Vaskas posited that fostering the development of consciousness is our raison d'être as human beings. In his work, Paligenesia: Reason for Being (written by his friend, Daniel Janisson), Vaskas makes the following argument. Genes are the foundation of human development, and after continuous transformations across generations, they construct consciousness. When the regulatory and modifying genes of the neurons in human brains that govern organic or mental functioning are still predominantly of non-human animal or proto-human types, humans think non-syllogistically, and they are... unconscious. But if, conversely, the majority of administrative-modifying genes coordinate in groups of neurons the outputs of sensations and emotions—after examining and verifying elements stored in memory, and processing or comparing new information with those memories—if they form new synaptic terminals and microtubule-neuroaxonic connections, and reason with syllogistic logic, their mental behavior changes from non-logical to logical and constitutes in the cortex the phenomenon of consciousness. This means that when human beings think syllogistically, they are… conscious. Thus, in Vaskas’s (hopeful) grand vision, as evolution progresses, ignorance will disappear, leading to the fulfillment of our "raison d'être": the union of all consciousnesses in true humanism (Vaskas and Janisson, 2022). Note that in Vaskas's view, there is no traditional "evolution" on Earth or elsewhere, but simply the unfolding of a universal code originating somehow from the universe itself that fosters consciousness and harmony, and contributes to the development of the human mind and consciousness. Perhaps we will discover the means to overcome aging, and even to achieve immortality. This, according to Vaskas, would mark the completion of the unfolding of our genetic code (Janisson, personal communication, 2026).