Re: Why Humans are Conscious



On Jan 29, 10:55 am, "feedbackdroid" <feedbackdr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 28, 11:20 pm, claudiusd...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jan 22, 7:25 pm, "Stephen" <stephe...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:The previous post makes it sound like ONLY humans, and maybe some
apes, have consciousness. However, this overlooks the idea, discussed
by Dan Dennett and Gerald Edelman among others, that there is a
continuum of consciousness in the animal kingdom.

Sure. To some degree. But human consciousness is orders of magnitude
higher than that of any other species, most notably our closest
relatives, chimps.

To help explicate
matters, they talk about "primary sensory consciousness", which at
least all mammals have (and which some people consider that all
animals have to a lesser degree), and "higher-order consciousness',
which only the highest primates have, and which involves language and
general ability to think raitonally and to manipulate symbols.

The corrollary to this is that, the latter (HOC) evolved out of, and
on top of, the former (PSC).





Why do humans have a consciousness?It's a direct result of the group/communal selective aspects of human
evolution:

1) A shift in world climate about 8 million years ago. (A shift in
Hadley cells [paleoclimatology--look it up].)

2) Resulting shift from a seasonless rain-forest habitat to a dry-
season dominated monsoon habitat.

3) Patchification of resulting treed habitat near source of perrenial
water into city-sized, town-sized patches of forest.

4) Emergence of large predators, especially in the surrounding
treeless or less treed habitat.

5) Resulting Isolation of (chimp)/A'pith communities at these treed
patches as a result of #3 and #4 above. (Note: isolation is essential
to the group selective aspects of this hypothesis. Without it
individuals or subgroups of a community site could [and would] easily
escape the dry season predatory massacres [see #6 below] that links
the fate of the members of a community to one another.)

6) Tendency of the predators to target community sites during the
desperate depths of the dry season that are impoverished, starving,
thirsty, experiencing internal strife and to ignore those that are
healthy, well-fed, and that maintain internal cooperation.

7) Emergence of large food-competitor species that, if left unchecked,
could and would rapidly deplete the resources in a (chimp)/A'pith
community thereby increasing the probability (see #6 above) that the
community site would be targeted by the opportunity seeking predators
during the desperate depths of the dry season.

8) Due to the implications of #1 through #7 above, the emergence of
cooperative rock-throwing, stick wielding behaviors in (chimp)/A'pith
directed against inmigrating food-competitor species. The communities
that were most successful in this behavior were the ones that best
avoided predatory massacres.

So, to answer the question, why did consciousness emerge in humans/
hominids? Because individuals that have consciousness/conscience are
more likely to be members of communities that are better able to
achieve the behavior/ends indicated in #8 above.

It's that simple.- Hide quoted text -- Show quoted text -


.

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