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.

I found this interesting pdf of a discussion involving Jaynes (and Dennett) and it makes clear what he believed, which was that the change was mostly cultural, and that uncontacted tribes might be bicameral, but there were none left. ( I'm not sure this is true - anyone reading this have an anthropologist handy ? )
Also contains a very odd fact (?) about children.

EDIT: Oops, didn't notice it was on Jaynes' own website. So presumably quite a lot more stuff there.

Also contains a very odd fact (?) about children.

Are you talking about the bit about imaginary friends on page 5?

1SilasBarta17y

Just a nitpick: Jaynes is dead; the site you refer to is that of the Julian Jaynes Society, which promotes his ideas about bicameralism.

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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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