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The origin of consciousness has been a major scientific and philosophic debate since ever. Sometimes the origin is considered a philosophical issue, while others consider it a physics issue.

Most modern physical views on consciousness are materialistic. These include, for example, the integrate information theory, where some mathematical quantity $\Phi$ would quantify connectivity, complexity and somehow consciousness.

Modern science is also based on this idea of emergence, that some physics can only be explained as a collective phenomena described by the subigredients. Who was the first science to produce such an hypothesis for consciousness? I would guess that some knowledge of statistics and physical phenomena would be required.

I have found that Thomas Henry Huxley had some theories on how consciousness is an epiphenomena that originates from neural activity. Was he the first or was somebody before him? Or was somebody else after with a more precise emergence hypothesis?

Similar question: When were brains seen as computers for the first time?

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    $\begingroup$ This is a prime example of what May described as futile "priority chasing":"If we describe a result with sufficient vagueness, there seems to be an endless sequence of those who had something within the vague specifications". Cabanis compared thinking to secretion of bile in 1802, La Mettrie wrote Man a Machine in 1747, we can even go back to Democritus. But neither they nor Huxley had cogent theories to go with it. Computational theory of mind dates to McCulloch and Pitts in 1940-s. $\endgroup$
    – Conifold
    Sep 11, 2021 at 9:19
  • $\begingroup$ "Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum" <-- some smartypants wrote that once $\endgroup$
    – Carl Witthoft
    Sep 13, 2021 at 13:23

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