Sunday, October 17, 2004

Consciousness Evolves

The nature (and therefore the experience) of consciousness evolves, driven (I contend) by the utility of the successful experience. So....it evolved into some kind of notable existence...and it continues to evolve even now....

What forces drive this change? What greater utilities might exist in the successful experience of consciousness tomorrow?

Reality TV shows et al. might fascinate us not for what they show us of our real selves, reflected in the revealed lives of others but perhaps how we might come to live our own lives. They show us lives that can be lived, examined and re-examined. Lives that are open and scrutinised by others allowing the observed to better access their unconscious selves. After all, the insights and opinions of others on our behaviour may well be more useful (to us!) than our own opinions. It is the magic mirror on the wall that tells us the effective truth about ourselves. Perhaps we wish to live our lives with the clean lines of a soap opera.

posted by Phil Rimmer @ 10:41 pm 0 comments

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Conscious / unconscious

The argument in favour of there being an actual need for the experience of consciousness is rooted in the sensation that conscious thought is somehow more effective than unconscious thought. It is perfectly possible to argue that whatever mental mechanisms are mooted in the creation of human behaviour you can always say at the last minute, "yes, but why can't you have all that without conscious experience?"

Darwin strongly suggests to us that every aspect of living things that has evolved has done so to confer some (at least temporary) advantage for those living things as carriers of genetic material. Blackmore, at a loss to explain the survival potential of the experience of consciousness, believes that this experience is a mere byproduct of memetic evolution intended to produce some other useful effect.

  • Perhaps only conscious thought can allow the artificial rigor of ordered logical thought. Logic is something we've invented and our brains are really not wired to process it with any reliability. Perhaps it is only with conscious thought that we can set up a dialogue (between ourselves and a virtual other).
  • Complex brains with high levels of cross linking can hang-up with indecision. Too much conflicting data may tend to balance out, obscuring clear paths of action. Emotion creates an underlieing instability and a bias that more often than not pushes us into action of some sort. I contend it is only in conscious thought that we can generate for ourselves the emotional charge necessary for a suucessful, future, anticipated act.

posted by Phil Rimmer @ 1:35 am 0 comments

Monday, October 04, 2004

lazyness

It suddenly came to me that a hunter-gather may seek to improve his/her (etc.) skill not so that he/she (ditto) may get more food, but so that he may get, merely, sufficient food whilst expending less energy. Being able to retrieve food whilst expending less energy means that during food shortages you will survive where your less efficient neighbour will not.

Maybe this became a driver for the development of our internal (mental) life. Studies have shown that people can successfully train for sporting type skills (muscle strength included) merely by imagining the activity. Whilst not as effective as physical training is for a professional athlete it can, on its own, give a useful boost to the performance of an armchair athlete.

I don't imagine for a moment that a hunter gatherer would consciously "train" to become a better hunter, though certainly children train through the physical exertion of play. And for adults, social activities such as dancing displays and the like, may partly serve such a function. It is rather that, probably, no training is done, so that mental training would increase physical prowess with little energy expenditure.

Indeed, a hungry and weakened hunter may have no option but to sit and imagine how he might catch his next meal. The more he imagined carrying out his actions the more poweful his muscles became and the "luckier" he got at hunting.

This imagining of a future process I have already argued is the real process involved in the exercising of free-will. The only point of making plans is if we can carry them out. If our initiation of actions precedes conscious thought then training the unconscious "beast" through conscious rehersal is the way to have some kind of control over their timing and delivery.


posted by Phil Rimmer @ 7:32 pm 0 comments