Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)

JulianMorrison

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

Morsella has gone back to basics. Forget art, symphonies, science. Forget the step-by-step learning of complex tasks. Those may be some of the things we use consciousness for now but that doesn’t mean that’s what it evolved for, any more than the cones in our eyes evolved to give kaleidoscope makers something to do. What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?

Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

Morsella has gone back to basics. Forget art, symphonies, science. Forget the step-by-step learning of complex tasks. Those may be some of the things we use consciousness for now but that doesn’t mean that’s what it evolved for, any more than the cones in our eyes evolved to give kaleidoscope makers something to do. What’s the primitive, bare-bones, nuts-and-bolts thing that consciousness does once we’ve stripped away all the self-aggrandizing bombast?

Morsella’s answer is delightfully mundane: it mediates conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles.

On that topic, I'd be curious to know how many LWers are familiar with the thesis of the other Jaynes - that is Julian Jaynes, the author of "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" - and what y'all make of that thesis.

I've been reading it, mainly because it seemed interesting and Dennett saw some merit in it (google "jaynes software archaeology"). I've finished the first section and some chapters in the 2nd and 3rd.

Unfortunately, I've put it off for a while, but here's what I remember as being impressive: Jaynes refutes a list of things people think consciousness is necessary for, citing experiments. For example, how people non-consciously learn and even act on what they learn, as shown in an experiment where people activate a nerve that's impossible to consc... (read more)

1Nubulous17y

How does Jaynes explain the lack of this kind of thinking among peoples who have culture and genes unchanged in the last 3000 years ?

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Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)

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Link: PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness (Peter Watts)

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