consciousness again...

 a tool that has been created by exaptation from awareness

we that is humans have created our own tools directly from the mind

pretty neat stuff

evolutionary in fact

how did humans acquire this faculty to alter everything in the natural world including themselves

the big question

my reader at vuw suggested wilhelm dilthey.

no, he was up a blind alley and complicated everything with verbose interpretations with no real explanatory power. he probably did his best.

so where did this faculty come from. 

surveys of current literature have become a morass of more and more speculative assumptions creating an unnecessarily complicated totally  unweildy model that ceases to resemble anything.

the answer is not here but a damm good read anyway