Of all the mysteries science has tackled, one remains unusually intimate: consciousness.
How does the physical brain produce thought, feeling, self-awareness and the experience of being a person? Why are we able to reflect on our own behaviour, imagine alternatives, judge ourselves and deliberately change course?
These are not peripheral questions. They go to the heart of the human condition.
The US National Institutes of Health has made understanding the human brain the central goal of its BRAIN Initiative, describing the challenge as explaining how organised neural circuits produce cognition and behaviour—the “essence of our mental lives”. Its scientific vision explicitly identifies thinking, feeling, perceiving, deciding and acting as central to understanding what makes us human.
So while philosophers have wrestled with the human condition for centuries, neuroscience is increasingly tackling some of its deepest questions directly.
Consciousness is still one of science’s great mysteries
At the University of Sussex, neuroscientist Anil Seth describes the emergence of conscious experience from the biology of the brain and body as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science and philosophy.
His research explores how the brain constructs conscious experience, including the provocative idea that perception is a form of “controlled hallucination”—the brain’s continually updated best guess about what is happening both outside and inside the body.
That work tackles a fundamental part of the human condition: how subjective experience itself arises.
The NIH BRAIN Initiative goes further still. Its neuroethics program notes that brain research inevitably intersects with questions of consciousness, agency, free will, identity and human nature. In other words, understanding the brain increasingly means confronting questions that once sat almost entirely within philosophy.
But consciousness creates another puzzle.
It doesn’t merely allow humans to experience the world. It enables us to reflect on our own behaviour, experiment, make choices and ask whether what we are doing is right or wrong.
That raises a deeper question about the human condition:
What psychological consequences followed when an animal became conscious enough to manage its own life?
When consciousness began directing behaviour
Evolution equipped animals with instincts long before humans possessed our extraordinary capacity for conscious reasoning.
Instinctive behaviour is shaped over generations through natural selection. Conscious learning works differently. It allows an individual to experiment, test alternatives and learn from cause and effect during its own lifetime.
That distinction becomes important when considering the work of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.
For readers wanting to know more about Jeremy Griffith, he is a biologist and founder of Fix The World, whose work has focused for decades on developing a biological explanation of the Human Condition.
Griffith argues that the emergence of consciousness created an unavoidable conflict between these two systems of behavioural guidance.
Once our ancestors became sufficiently conscious, he proposes, the intellect had to begin experimenting with managing life for itself. It could not simply follow pre-existing instinctive orientations forever, because genuine understanding can only be acquired by testing experience and learning what works.
Inevitably, some of those experiments departed from instinctive guidance.
According to Griffith, the problem was that neither side could initially explain the conflict. The instincts could only continue expressing their established orientations, while the developing conscious mind did not yet possess enough knowledge to explain why its experimentation was necessary.
Griffith argues that the conscious mind therefore experienced instinctive opposition as condemnation.
A psychological explanation of the human condition
In Griffith’s account, that conflict had enormous psychological consequences.
Humans became insecure about their worth and increasingly sought to prove themselves, retaliate against criticism and distance themselves from the source of the condemnation.
He argues that this defensive response produced the anger, egocentricity and alienation that became characteristic of the human condition.
The explanation therefore places consciousness itself at the centre of humanity’s psychological predicament.
Rather than treating our destructive behaviour simply as the expression of aggressive or selfish animal instincts, Griffith proposes that much of it developed as a psychological response to the difficult transition from instinctive to conscious self-management.
That claim also leads to the most consequential part of his explanation.
If humanity became angry, egocentric and alienated because the conscious mind could not explain why it had to defy instinctive guidance, then those behaviours need not be permanent.
Griffith argues that once we can understand why consciousness had to experiment—why the intellect’s apparent defiance of instinct was necessary in order to gain knowledge—the original sense of condemnation can be resolved.
In his account, explaining the human condition therefore removes the underlying need for the defensive behaviour that arose from it.
Science turns inward
The scientific study of consciousness is still developing rapidly.
Seth and other consciousness researchers are investigating how subjective experience arises from brain and body. The NIH BRAIN Initiative is attempting to connect neural activity with cognition and behaviour while confronting fundamental questions about agency, identity and human nature. Griffith approaches another level of the problem: what happened psychologically when consciousness became capable of managing behaviour independently of instinct.
These are different questions, but they belong to the same larger scientific endeavour.
Understanding the human condition requires understanding not only what humans do, but what consciousness is, how it emerged and what its emergence did to us.
Science has spent centuries explaining the world consciousness observes.
Explaining consciousness itself—and the human condition that accompanied it—may prove to be the more difficult task.
